


All Earthly Treasures

by Laguera25



Category: RED (Movies), The Bourne Supremacy (2004), The Chronicles of Riddick Series
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Domestic, F/M, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-04
Updated: 2020-01-04
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:41:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 33,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22119577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laguera25/pseuds/Laguera25
Summary: If you had told William Cooper that this would happen, he would have laughed in your face.  But then again, Kirill has never been the predictable sort.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 4





	All Earthly Treasures

**Author's Note:**

  * For [the_random_writer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_random_writer/gifts).



> I'm once again play in the sandbox constructed by The_random_writer. Indulge me.

William Cooper has never been accused of being a sentimental man. There's no room for such softness in a job that so often requires ruthlessness and cruelty and cold efficiency in the calculation of the worth of men's lives. The wedding ring on his left hand and a box full of photos of his children that he keeps in the floor safe he had installed under the closet in their bedroom when Michelle and the kids were at her parents' are the only concessions he grants to a life outside the job, and even the latter is his little secret, tucked carefully inside his heart like a secret rosary.

But watching his little brother be in love is a treasure that will be pried from him only when they lower him into the damp, black Virginia earth and cover him over, a secret as deep as the floor safe in his closet and grown fainter with the passing of the seasons. He collects each moment with the conscientious avidity of a magpie, plucks the bright thread of it from the warp and woof of the tapestry of which it is a part and carries it away with him, whisks it away to the bland privacy of his office or the winding running trail along which he pounds four mornings a week, his leg muscles a warm, malleable throb beneath his track pants and his mind temporarily freed from the insistent clutches of the job and endless need for milk, two percent. They're clearest, then, these snapshots of his brother that he has so deftly spirited away, and he turns them over in his mind with an ecstasy that borders on the erotic, Gollum rocking and crooning to his Precious in the privacy of his cave.

Kirill, tight-lipped and mulish as he slouched over a steaming cup of coffee and dared him to make something of the fact that he and Siberius shared a bed and their bodies.

_Yes._ The protective snap of a cornered stray. _We have a thing going._ Spit from his mouth like a loosened tooth, and even in his dazed, pain-raddled state, William could see the tension in shoulders, too high on his lean frame, and the flare of his nostrils as he sought for danger on air that had suddenly grown too thin and too close.

_Hey, no judgment._ He'd raised his bruised, raw-knuckled hands in submission. _Just didn't figure he was your type._ A sip of his own coffee, strong and hot and delicately spiced, to soothe a throat long disused for anything but screaming and cursing. _I seem to remember you liked them a bit softer._

_With tits and a cunt, you mean._ Blunt as a sledgehammer and just as graceless.

_Well, yes,_ he'd thought but had not said. It had seemed impolitic given the wary set of Kirill's shoulders, not to mention unkind, what with the industrious, domestic clatter of the "him" in question from the cabin's small, ancient kitchen.

_I'm just surprised, is all._ So lame, and hardly much better than the words trapped behind his teeth, an assessment mirrored by his brother's thunderous expression. He'd taken hurried refuge behind another sip of exquisite coffee and thanked God when the object of his brother's unexpected affections had appeared with a sizzling plate in each hand and another pair balanced on his arms. Then, as always, Nera had been served first, but the second plate, heaped with hashbrowns and fried eggs and crispy bacon and plump sausage glistening with fat, had been placed in front of Kirill, accompanied by a kiss to his temple and a squeeze of his shoulder.

_There you are,_ ma atet nin.

_Ma atet nin._ A string of sounds he would come to hear again and again in the weeks they spent at the cabin, that cocoon of sun-dappled meadow and stolid wood in which they had bid him heal before he returned to Mike and his babies and their own fathomless measures of anguish at his long and cruel absence. They had meant nothing to him, alien and impossible on his human tongue, but they had meant everything to Kirill, who had seldom heard such sweetness or been given a promise so dear. Kirill's eyelashes had fluttered at the sheer pleasure of them, and his shoulders, which had hovered around his ears from the moment William had opened his mouth, had relaxed, and when Kirill's gaze had followed Siberius' cheerful, brisk circuit around the table, William had understood. It wasn't just a thing for Kirill, a silly romp to be enjoyed for a night or a season and then forgotten.

For Kirill, his underfed, love-starved, furious little brother, abused by the world for its own ends and discarded without a twinge by his masters when no more profit could be wrung from him, it was, quite simply, everything.

Kirill, curled in the lee of Siberius' body in their bed in the milky, pre-dawn light, a sheet draped over his hips, lips clamped shut against the hot, red agony of his throbbing skull.

_Sssh,_ ma atet nin, _ssh. You are here with me, and nothing will hurt you._ Siberius' voice, low and soothing in his ear, and his long, supple fingers, white as the dawn fog beyond the condensation-damp windows, carding through the soft stubble of his hair. _It's all right to sleep. I will watch over you._

Kirill, that child of pith and sinew and bitter distrust, relaxing into those inexorable, patiently-carding hands, lean body going slack as he surrendered to sleep with nothing to protect him but a thin film of cotton and Siberius' sense of honor.

Kirill, slumped at the table with his hands curled around a tin cup of tea hot enough to inspire a stipple of sweat on his upper lip, hollow-eyed and haggard but unafraid as Siberius bustled behind him, reaching out now and then to stroke his hair or skim solicitous fingers over his bare shoulder.

_It's good tea, Viko. You want a cup?_ Sleepy and slurred with contentment, and Kirill had offered him a muzzy smile and tipped his battered mug toward him in invitation.

But it was not his tea to drink, had not been made for him with love and reverence and quiet concern, and so he had shaken his head and swallowed the lump in his throat and gone outside to get a grip on himself under the guise of checking the perimeter for unwanted guests, as if they weren't in the frozen asshole of nowhere in the heart of the Alaskan wilderness, swallowed whole by the towering and ageless pines that loomed over the cabin, dispassionate and inscrutable. He'd staggered onto the sagging, swaybacked porch and wished for the sear of frigid winter air in his lungs so that he could blame it for the tears in his eyes. But it had been the heart of the brief Alaskan summer, and there was no arctic wind to spare him, and so he had simply collapsed onto the top step and stared into the trees and tucked his chin to his burning chest until his hands had stopped shaking and his heart had slowed to a dull, aching thud inside his chest.

_He hasn't been fussed over like that since we were kids,_ he'd thought as he'd sucked in the cool morning air and blinked against the prickling scald in his eyes. Their mother had loved them both, and she'd never made it obvious, but he's always thought Kirill was her favorite, the solitary, wide-eyed winsome child who had loved her pencils and her paints as much as he'd loved his soccer ball and his knockoff action figures that had smelled of cheap PVC and left flecks of garish paint on his palms like sloughing skin, and who had often toddled into her studio and plopped himself down in the middle of the floor to watch her work. She'd always smiled at the sight of him looking up at her, eager to see what wonders she would work with her brushes and strategically-smearing fingers. She'd brushed those same fingers through his hair, so unruly and wild then, much as Siberius had done in passing, and when he had shown the first glimmer of wanting to follow in her footsteps, she had bought him his first pencils and sketchbooks over the grumbling objections of their father and encouraged his efforts, no matter how wobbly and misshapen.

_What a fine eye you have, my Kiryusha,_ she'd say as she examined his uncertain scrawls, and Kirill would beam at her, his small boy's heart grown three sizes by her praise.

Sometimes he thinks that's why his father chose Kirill on that fateful day when he'd taken the waddling family station wagon and driven out of their lives forever. He had been a brute and a loud and angry drunk, but never a fool, and he must've known, must've seen that Kirill was her favorite, her faithful little shadow for whom she had the highest of hopes. How better to hurt her than to take what she love most and remake it in his own twisted image? Or maybe he'd simply been determined that she wouldn't spoil him with a woman's softness and fill his head with notions of color and line and light and depth. Such things were nothing but woman's work and of no use to a boy. Best to save him from her foolish, coddling clutches and ensure that one of his sons, at least, became a man. So he'd left William behind without a backward glance and fled to St. Petersburg and a dreary apartment of Soviet concrete and steel, a joyless, hotbox crucible in which he'd reforged his younger boy into something more useful to the Motherland.

And then he'd gone and gotten his brains blown out in some anonymous kill room and left him to the mercies of men who saw him as nothing but a weapon to be used until he broke or his blood followed their father's into the Moscow sewer.

Kirill, yielding and vulnerable in a ragged, lumpy bed that had somehow become sacred despite the threadbare, faded sheet and ancient sweat stains, eyelids fluttering and mouth slack as Siberius rode him, scarred alabaster skin gone silver in the milky, predawn light. One gun-callused hand curled around the spar of one sinuously-undulating hip and the other caressing Siberius' cheek, a devotee stroking the face of his idol.

_Bozhe moi, moya lyubov'._ An order softened to entreaty by raw need, and his hips twitched as they rose to meet Siberius' slow descent. His breath came in stuttering gasps, peppered with obscenities William expected as he hovered stupidly in the doorway, sleep-fogged and stunned and mortified by his inability to beat a tasteful retreat, and with honeyed endearments of which he'd thought him utterly incapable. _Sweetheart. Angel. Gift from God._

It's the hand on Siberius' cheek that has seeded itself in the fertile soil of his memory, and it comes to him when he least expects it, a quicksilver flash on the periphery of his awareness that snatches the breath from him as he idles in the drive-thru of some greasy shit shack, the cloying stink of car exhaust and old oil coating his tongue in a noxious slick that makes his stomach roll or standing in line at the Safeway with a cart full of pasta and ground beef and frozen chicken nuggets purportedly in the shape of dinosaurs but that look to him like amorphous tumors skillfully repackaged by an enterprising oncologist.

_It's the unguarded tenderness of it,_ he thinks as he shifts on the couch and takes a pull from his beer and eyes a taciturn, fidgety Kirill as he hums and grunts and scowls at him as if it's his fault that the words won't come. _He's been a hardass for a long time, and if the debriefing files I've read are even half-right, any sense of humanity was beaten out of him by his COs and his handlers. The man in those pages was a monster, all teeth and claws and cold indifference, and he happily slit the throats and blew out the brains of fathers and mothers and beloved grandfathers. And he had no compunction about leaving the bodies for the kiddies to find when they went looking for Mommy and Daddy in the morning. Monsters like that don't love; they need and use and dispose of the carcass without a twinge of regret._

_It's all true. Most of it came from Kirill's own mouth while he sat in some windowless room three floors below the ostensible basement and spilled his guts into a microphone while a nameless stenographer clacked away behind a two-way mirror. But the drone who transcribed that report never saw that hand, never saw the way he looked at Siberius, like he was the light of the whole goddamn world._

_There have been glimmers in the months since, echoes of what he had thought lost in his careful play with the giddy, shrieking dervish that is Tati, that force of nature that has chosen the name of daughter, or in his hopes of teaching Andrew the finer points of his beloved soccer, but they are but pale shades, and they carry the weight of family obligation and the knowledge that they are my kids. Siberius belongs to Kirill alone, and Kirill's love for him is savage and absolute, a hearty fuck you to all the bastards who tried to make him forget its sweetness._

"What the fuck are you staring at?" The sullen snarl jolts him from his train of thought, and he hums and shifts on the couch again. 

"What?"

"What?" Kirill mimics dourly, and snorts. "You look like you are dreaming of a handjob."

_Oh, I'm dreaming of a hand, all right,_ he thinks, and seals the words behind a sip of beer. "I've got to do something to fill the hours of your charming company."

Kirill scowls at him. "I need to talk to you."

"Clearly."

"Fuck you." He shifts and scratches and takes a defiant swig of his own beer.

"Feel free to start anytime."

That earns him a wordless finger, and Kirill settles further into the couch.

William waits. Kirill is as stubborn as the Russian winter for which he still yearns, and if he pushes, they'll still be sitting here when Tati packs her bags for college.

"I love Siberius," Kirill says at last, the words pried from his mouth like meat from the jaws of a starving stray. He stares at him, eyes unblinking and chin set in unconscious defiance. _You heard me. Make something of it._

"I hadn't noticed," he murmurs wryly, and in his mind's eye, he sees Kirill's hand against Siberius' cheek, reverent and beseeching as he bared himself.

Kirill, struggling against his restraining arm, reaching for a panicked Nera and a bewildered Siberius.

_What the fuck are you doing? Don't fucking touch them!_ His eyes ablaze with fury and a wounded betrayal that made his heart sink into his toes.

I didn't do this, Kir, I promise. Please believe me. _Hey. Hey, it's all right. Just relax, and we'll get this figured out._

_Fuck you. This is not fucking all right. Is bullshit. Where are they taking them?_ Then, to the dark-suited slab of anonymity herding a sobbing, struggling Nera into the oh-so-comforting confines of a company SUV with untraceable plates and no interior locks, _Stop fucking hurting her, you lumbering piece of worthless fucking protocol, or I will hunt down everyone with a drop of your blood in their line and leave their gutted corpses on your doorstep._

_Hey! Hey! You keep talking like that, and you'll be on a plane back to Russia._

_I don't give a shit. They have no right to take them anywhere. They have done nothing._

_I know. But this isn't the way to handle it. This will just create a big fucking mess that I'm not sure I can fix._

_Why? You afraid I'll embarrass your respectable fucking neighbors?_ he snarled, and right on cue, lights flicked on in several of the houses situated on the cul-de-sac with prim, tasteful elegance.

_The best thing to do is to let them take them. That way, we can regroup-_

And then Nera twisted in the stone-fingered grip of her escort and wailed, high and piercing and full of nameless terror, and Kirill had no patience for his reasoned argument. He simply slipped from his grasp with the cold grace of a cobra, his face a blank he knew only too well from the grainy, long-range photos in his dossier, and lunged.

_And damned if your whole life didn't flash before your eyes. You were so sure that your storybook reunion with your brother was going to end in a tangle of limbs and a puddle of blood on the smooth asphalt of the driveway while your fellow agents riddled his body with enough lead to have him reclassified as a statue and your kids watched their shy, oddly-endearing uncle bleed to death. Either that, or he'd be bundled into another carefully-nondescript SUV and ushered off American soil and back to Russia. You'd never hear another word about him, never mind that you shared a soul, and you'd spend the rest of your life wondering what happened and wrestling the nightmares about all the ways they tortured him before they put a bullet in his head and chucked him into some rusting incinerator and let his ashes mix with the dirty snow that blanketed the cracked and runneled sidewalks._

_But miracle of miracles, it wasn't the agent he went for. Instead, he slipped himself between Siberius, who had gone dangerously still beside his own wrangler, and the oblivious herder of wailing children. He captured Siberius' face in his hands and pressed their foreheads together and murmured in a language you could not understand, low and indistinct and strangely maternal, and in your mind's eye, you saw them in the predawn light in the bedroom of that Alaskan cabin, Kirill's lips slack with desire and his hand pressed to his cheek._

_Whatever Kirill said, it had the desired effect. Siberius, who had been assessing his undoubted target with the sloe-eyed intensity of a mountain lion peering from the thin lip of an outcropping, relaxed, and his eyes closed in wordless submission. Crisis averted, and score one for the crisis-management skills of William Cooper, who was on track to the big chair at Langley, but you felt no surge of triumph, only a leaden misery in the pit of your belly that reminded you of one shot too many and brought a bitter slick to the back of your throat._

Score one for the good guys, _you thought morosely as Kirill continued to murmur in Siberius' ear, thin and brittle and entreating and Siberius' hands rose to offer absolution, and wished like hell that your nosy neighbors would mind their own fucking business and stop gawking at this squalid little drama being played out in your driveway while your children watched you stand here with your dick in your hand._

I'm sorry. _It was a plea for pardon sent into the universe with every beat of your heart as Siberius' wrangler pulled him from Kirill's grasp with a peremptory tug meant to get this interrupted show on the road so Agent Dickwheeze could return to the urgent task of massaging his balls through his government-approved chinos while he thumbed the pages of the_ Busty Bombshells Monthly _he thought he kept so secret in his desk in the bullpen. Siberius stiffened, but the thought of resistance guttered and died as soon as it formed, and he let himself be led away and shoved into the back of the SUV._

_And oh, the memories that brought back, didn't it, Mr. CIA Agent Man? A taser to the side of the neck and a black bag over your head. A flurry of blows from hands like stones, a syringe in the side of the neck. The eternal, delirious ride on the floor of what felt like a panel van on under-inflated tires. and days that bled one into the next while they held a towel over your mouth and nose and drowned you in open air and pricked your skin with heated needles in a bid to pry the deep, dark secrets of the company from your cracked and bleeding lips. Eight months in the hole in the asshole of the world, and then that man and your brother kicked in the door of your cage and left nothing but a trail of blood and bodies and one squirming bag dropped at feet like a mangled mouse presented by a pair of satisfied cats. Revenge served, not cold, but piping hot, and this was how you paid them back._

I'm sorry. _Desperate now, and self-loathing, and your fingers twitched with the memory of the juice your tormentors had sent through your nipples and testicles with gleeful, alarming regularity._ I'm so sorry. If my babies weren't here, and Mike. But they are, and I can't take the chance of them getting caught in the crossfire. They didn't ask for this. Just let me get them out of this, and I will make this right.

_Siberius might've gone without a fuss, soothed by your brother's sweet nothings, but Nera had received no such comfort, and she knew a raw deal when she saw one. She yowled with the ferocity of a cornered kitten, teeth bared and face wet with tears, and sat down on the driveway. Her idiot brother could get into the big, scary car with the strangers who exuded all the inviting warmth of frost-rimed concrete, but she would not be, thank you very much. She twisted her scrawny torso at an angle that made your own lats burn in sympathy and looked at Kirill. There were no words in the keen that escaped her lips, but you understood it all the same._ Help me. Don't let the bogeymen get me.

_And every fiber of your brother wanted to answer that plaintive call. His weight shifted as though to step toward her and scoop her off the asphalt still warm with the lingering heat of a Virginia summer evening._

Kirill, _you called quietly, and he froze, front knee bent and hand hovering uncertainly just beyond her reach. He turned his head to meet your gaze, and you wished like hell it were acceptable for grown men to weep, because while his face was impassive, his eyes were alive with anguish._

Please, Viko. 

Please don't hurt my family, _you had begged the unseen bogeyman that was Frank Moses once upon a time, when he'd sat in your living room and watched them play in the backyard, blissfully unaware of how close they were to paying for your sins. All your pride had flown away, and you would have betrayed every oath you had ever sworn if it would keep them safe. Now Kirill was asking the same mercy Moses had granted you that day, when it would have been so easy for him to leave a slaughterhouse in his wake, and you could not give him the same gift._

_An imperceptible, wretched shake of your head._ I need you to trust me.

_Time slowed, and then it simply hung. Kirill flinched as though struck, and then he turned to look at Nera, who was straining so hard to reach him that you wondered how she hadn't sprained everything below her shoulders or popped her shoulder out of joint. His hand rose, and you were sure that he had made his choice, had chosen love over fraternity, but then it had fluttered jerkily on the air._

_If you go to hell for all the dirty, miserable deeds you have done in the dark, you're sure you'll be carried there on the sob loosed from that little girl. It was heartbreak and anger. And betrayal. That most of all, and Kirill cringed from it, face turned and mouth working. His hand continued to flutter blindly at her, but she was no longer looking at him. She had given up her fight to reach a safety that had proven to be an illusion and simply slumped, and when the agent picked her up, she lolled in his arms like a leaking sack of grain._

Put them in the same car, for fuck's sake, _you croaked. Hardly the commanding bellow for which you had hoped, and the agents ignored you anyway. You had lost a bit of your luster by falling off the face of the earth for eight months and reappearing with two strangers with no IDs in any known database, though that little nugget wouldn't be revealed for a few hours yet. They gave not a fig for what you wanted. They simply packed their quarry into their cars and drove away and left you with the sudden, ringing silence and the acrid, accusatory stink of diesel on the air._

A small voice broke the silence. Where are the bad men taking them, Daddy? _Tati, pinched, almost waspish, and as you looked into her somber, too-pale face, you realized you hadn't protected her completely. She had still been caught by the ugly, indifferent shrapnel that so often came with the honor of serving your country. For the rest of her days, she would remember the new friend with whom she and Andrew had so happily played for three idyllic weeks being carted off to God knows where while her father let it happen._

I don't know, sweetheart, _you managed around the lump in your throat, and it was true. You didn't. But you had ideas, and they made your stomach churn. You cleared your throat._ Why don't you guys go inside with Mommy? I'll be in in just a minute, okay? _You ruffled her hair and mustered a smile that felt unsteady and false on your lips._

_Michelle needed no second invitation to herd her precious charges inside and lock the door, and then it was just you and Kirill and the unseen presence of your rubbernecking neighbors._

Go inside, _you wanted to shout, but that would only have added to the sorry spectacle, and so you willed your temples to stop throbbing and turned your attention to Kirill._

_He was right where the marauding band of agents had left him, shoulders slumped and hands fisted so tightly that they trembled and gaze fixed on the route the caravan of SUVs had taken when they'd rumbled out of your cozy little suburb and left him nothing but the stink of exhaust and the memory of Nera's betrayed howl. You hadn't seen his hands tremble since they were fisted in your shirt in that CIA hospital in Langley, when you'd risen from the dead and reduced him to a shivering, sobbing child._

Kir-

They saved you, _he said, so dully that your heart dropped into your toes._ If Siberius hadn't given enough of a shit about my poor kidnapped twin brother to risk himself and his little sister against the Lord Marshall, I'd be fucking dead or on the run from a army that doesn't care if it lives or dies and never stops or rests until it's won its victory, and you'd still be rotting in that shithole and looking forward to your next round of doing the electric jitterbug until you shit yourself. They risked everything for me. For you.

I had no choice. I had to protect my family-

_He rounded on you._ And they were my family! _It was a primal roar, all teeth and tongue and the copper and iron tang of blood welling from a deep, internal wound no doctor could ever reach. His fingers flexed and curled, flexed and curled, and you knew he was fantasizing about wrapping them around your useless, limp-dick throat and squeezing until your trachea collapsed like wet cardboard._ They were mine. My one chance to have something good, to have what is so easy- _He spared a glance at your lovely brick Colonial, paid for in full by Michelle's doting parents. Warm, golden light glowed behind the expensive curtains, and neither of you had any doubt that Michelle was watching, breath in her throat and phone in hand, poised to call 911 should he decide to stop talking and start throwing. Wouldn't_ that _be a delight for all the eager looky-loos gathered like a plague of grackles to watch the drama? It would probably be the talk of garden parties for summers to come._

_You opened your mouth to protest that it hadn't been easy, but then you closed it again because in your heart, you knew it was bullshit. It_ had _been easy for you. Sure you'd grown up without your brother and father, and yeah, the Marines had torn your ass up and reassembled to their exacting specifications, but you'd done it safe and secure in the love of your mother and doting grandparents, and there'd always been food in your belly. You'd never had to choose between what was right and what kept you fed, and when you married Michelle, she came with a fat trust fund that meant you never would._

_You thought of Pamela Landy, sitting in her office and telling you that Kirill likely would have died if his body hadn't been so accustomed to trauma and torture, and of how thin he'd been in the hospital despite weeks of regular, if not unappealing, meals, so ramshackle and fragile in your embrace._

They were my family, and you sold them out, and I will always be Nera's monster. _The smile he gave you was hollow and curdled and too big for his face, and the hairs at your nape prickled._ But at least your family is safe. _He clapped you on the shoulder and spit at your feet, and then he turned and stalked toward the house with an oddly wooden gait that did nothing to dispel your growing sense of unease._

_You hurried after him, convinced that in his grief, he would lash out at Mike and the kids, but he only stalked past them like the knife's edge a gathering gale and clattered down the basement steps to the room that was still his despite the fact that he had his own spartan little apartment a few miles away._

Should we-? _Mike asked when the door slammed hard enough to rattle it in its frame._

No, _you said softly._ Just...let him go.

_It was five minutes before you heard the first crash, a thunderous thud that reverberated through the soles of your feet as you shuffled listlessly around the kitchen, nuking bowls of Chef Boyardee and fighting the urge to dry-heave into the sink. The house was too quiet and too empty, and as you plopped the ad hoc dinner into a pair of bowls for children who had no appetite, you thought of the meal you should've had and the people who should've been there with you. Nera, with her inexhaustible enthusiasm for a life she was just beginning to discover, and who had happily accepted you into her circle of safe people, had greeted you with amiable chirrups and hoots and cheerfully endured your fumbling attempts at sign. Siberius, who had accepted you and yours as easily as he'd accepted Kirill, and who was the best cook, bar none, you had ever met._

Even the glorified oatmeal he fed you the first day after your rescue was out of this world, _your conscience whispered as you rummaged in the utensil drawer for some spoons._ Sweet and piping hot and thick enough to coat the spoon and your ribs, with a touch of brown sugar that made you want to curl your toes with every bite. The broth the next morning was just as divine, and when he served a perfectly smoked salmon for dinner, you briefly entertained the notion of polygamy. You had no idea where he found his ingredients, and fuck if you cared. It was paradise on a plate, and he never stinted, never begrudged you a morsel. He coaxed life back into you a bite at a time until you were strong enough to greet your family looking mostly as they remembered you and not as a sunken, emaciated wraith, and now, if he's alive at all, he and his little sister will be scarfing grey bologna on stale bread and sleeping on a roll of mylar.

Score one for the good guys, _you thought dismally, and your hands were shaking so badly when you picked up the kids' bowls that the spoons tinkled merrily against the cheap ceramic._

Are you all right? _Mike asked, gaze flicking from your face to your trembling hands._

No! _you wanted to shout._ I am not all right. I am, in fact, the furthest thing from all right, and frankly, I'm not sure how you're fucking doing so well. _But you had never raised your voice to Michelle before, and you weren't about to start while your kids were at the table, and so you just plopped the bowls in front of them._

Eat up, _you said with all the enthusiasm they evidently felt, and then you sank into the nearest chair and wished you had the strength to get yourself a straight whiskey. But that would mean getting up again, and such a feat was beyond you, and so you simply slumped in your chair and watched the kids pick at their food._

_Tati burst into furious, exhausted tears after a particularly rousing crash from downstairs, and Andrew, usually steady as he went, didn't look much better himself, and thus ended the Cooper family dinner. Michelle shot you a stricken, lost look and hurried the kids to the safer and more calming confines of their shared bathroom, where she could block out the tumult of their uncle's meltdown with music and bubbles and mindless patter, and you cleared the table and made a beeline for the whiskey. No tumbler. You just stood over the sink and swilled until the memory of Nera contorting herself in an effort to reach Kirill lost its terrible, cutting sharpness and the thumps and crashes of his impotent fury grew muted and indistinct._

_You were pleasantly drunk by the time you wobbled into the bedroom and picked inelegantly at the buttons of your shirt._ How're the kids? _you asked muzzily as you frowned at the intransigent flecks of plastic that kept slipping through your fingers._

How do you think? _came the peevish reply._ Agents swarmed their driveway and took their new friends away like criminals, and now their crazy Russian uncle is going apeshit downstairs.

Of course he's going apeshit. They took his family. And I stood there like an asshole and asked him to let them do it, _you thought, but your more politic--and more defensive mouth said,_ Of course he's going apeshit. They kidnapped them in front of him, and all he could do was stand there and take it. It's like poking a starving wolf and coming away with all your limbs intact. And they're not criminals, they're refugees.

Do you think those people know that?

No. _What was more, you weren't sure they cared._

What's going to happen to them? _she asked softly as she came over to reinforce you in your battle against the stubborn buttons, her fingers cool and smooth and deft against against your blundering ones._

I don't know, _you admitted, and it was true, but it was also true true that you had some very definite ideas, oh, yes, of lightless rooms and frigid water and electric current dancing over bare skin while your teeth ground mercilessly and dangerously inside your seizing mouth. Kirill had ideas, too, which was why he was tearing himself and your basement apart. But you could not say this to Mike as she stroked your face in the way that always loosened the knots of misery and apprehension in the center of your chest and looked at you as though she still thought you hung the moon, even if you'd gotten it a little crooked this go round. She might've known you worked in the shadows, but she didn't need to see what lay behind them, and so you mustered a smile and raised her hand to your bourbon-tinged lips to kiss the knuckles._ Let's see how things look in the morning. I'm too fried to think.

Drunk, you mean, she said indulgently, and rose on her toes to give you a kiss. I can smell it, and even if I couldn't, your fumble fingers give it away. _She finished unbuttoning your shirt and settled onto her soles again._

I'll show you fumble fingers, _you muttered, but it was idle affection, nothing more. Neither of you had either the energy or the inclination to do anything but shuffle into the bathroom and brush your teeth before falling into bed._

_Michelle went slack almost immediately, but sleep was a long time coming for you, much as you longed for it. Every time you started to drift, Michelle a reassuring weight against your chest, you thought of Kirill, brooding in a bed that should've held the same warmth but was much too empty, a vast expanse of Russian winter without end, and your eyes would fly open and you'd watch the numbers of your alarm clock bleed from one to the next in a lurid, red smear. You were tempted to get up and make sure that he hadn't eaten his Sig Sauer in a final, gaudy fuck you to you and your perfect suburban happily ever after, but you were too afraid of what you might find. You wanted one last night of believing it wasn't as bad as it felt, and so you stared at the ceiling and at the shimmer of Michelle's nightgown until exhaustion pulled you under despite all the protests of your restless conscience._

_It was every bit as bad as it felt, or so you discovered the next morning when you gathered a cup of coffee and your courage and went to the ominously-silent basement to investigate. No, you didn't find his brains splattered on the walls, his collapsed head lolling against the back of the couch and his gun between his splayed legs like a flaccid dick, but you did find a chaotic jumble of shattered glass and ruined furniture. The fifty-inch flatscreen on which he had so happily watched so much porn and so many soccer matches was now facedown on the floor like a felled boxer, its screen pocked with holes and veined with cracks. The sandstone-colored couch was tipped onto its back, and as you stared in sleep-gummed dismay at its cushions that flapped upwards like gum tissue peeled from the bone with careless savagery, your muddled brain wondered if it had been the TV's equally-luckless opponent. It was an idiot thought, but it was easier than than the ugly reality lurking at the base of your brain._

If it was, _you thought as you blinked down at the couch's upturned dust ruffle and broken plastic crunched under your feet like flecks of bone and broken tooth,_ there was a third entrant into the brawl. _The end table that had stood sentinel beside the couch since you'd put it there five years ago with heady plans for your own kid-free sanctuary of ballgames and respectable booze in cut-glass decanters that caught the recessed light and reflected it in a dazzling kaleidoscope of color against the eggshell walls was a pile of kindling, the knob of its smashed drawer protruding from the pile like a navel._

_The walls were the worst of it, though. They had borne the brunt of Kirill's mindless rage and were studded with gaping holes, lesions on a battered face. There were minute traces of blood around some of the holes, and as you stepped gingerly through the wreckage, you guessed that they were made later, after the skin of his knuckles had bruised and swollen and split._

_It wasn't until the bathroom that your stomach dropped and roiled and you clutched the doorframe to steady yourself. The toilet and small shower stall were untouched and glaringly white to your burning, throbbing eyes, but the pedestal sink was splashed with blood so crimson it made them water._

Oh, shit, _you managed thickly, and ran your fingers through your hair. For one crazed instant, you thought that Kirill had slit his wrists and fled into the surrounding woods to bleed out in the crisp, quiet beauty of a Virginia morning. Better to die among the birds and the trees and with the gurgle and rush of the creek behind the house in his ears than to drag himself through a life he'd never been asked if he wanted and to listen to your self-serving, useless apologies for the next fifty years, until the blessed deafness of old age blotted it out._

_Then you took a steadying breath and realized that there wasn't enough blood for that. No arterial spray, no fine mist settled over every surface like dust, just that vivid, red splash grown tacky and clotted and the silver slivers of a broken mirror. He was cut, yes, and possibly with intent, but not_ lethal _intent. If Kirill wanted to kill himself, he'd've waited until he was on the banks of the creek and opened his jugular into the lazily-rolling stream. He was nothing if not tidy and efficient._

_The thought made panic flutter in the pit of your stomach, frenetic and tenebrous as a hummingbird's wings battering the bars of its cage, and you left the wreckage of your mancave that had never quite come to fruition and ran for the creek in your socked feet, flew past a sleep-puffy Mike as she gaped at you from the opposite shore of the kitchen island, coffeepot hovering over her waiting mug. You couldn't lose him again, could not surrender half your soul and keep moving through the world as you always had. If you lost him this time, there would be no doubt, no tiny ember of hope to warm your blood and help you sleep at night when the dreams of so many maybes crowded your head that it threatened to explode. If you lost him now, there would be no reprieve, no return of the prodigal son._

_If you lost him now, it would be your fault._

_There was no Kirill at the creek, crumpled beneath the pines in a pool of blood gone dry and tacky beneath him. No Kirill bobbing facedown in the gentle current, shirt a loose billow around mottled skin. No Kirill anywhere. He was as gone as though he had never been there at all, and the house felt barren and desolate with the knowledge of his absence and the dark surmise that he would never return._

_You called and texted with the obsessive regularity of a spurned lover, cajoling, pleading, and outright ordering on the authority of the twelve extra minutes granted you by virtue of being first into the world, but time had done nothing to blunt his stubbornness, and he maintained his obdurate silence. You got so desperate for contact and proof of life that you got Tati to record a video message to her adored uncle, but the silence remained, stony and implacable. You tried pinging his phone; you were in the goddamned CIA, after all, and what good were all the gadgets if you couldn't use them to track your wayward and wounded brother, but he was too smart to turn it on for more than two seconds at a time, and frankly, you were mystified as to why he was even doing it that much. Later, the answer would come, and when it did, the sorrow for him was an arthritic throb in your bones._

Oh, Kir, _you thought as you stared at the two small duffel bags that held everything Siberius and Nera owned, including their cheap, prepaid phones._ I am so sorry.

_In the end, it wasn't the fancy company equipment that found him, but the pimply thirteen-year-old kid who lived in the apartment across from Kirill's, and who spent most of his after-school hours hacking into the security cameras around the city in a bid to see as many women as possible in as little as possible._

Wow, man, you look different, _the kid said when he spotted you lurking morosely outside Kirill's door one afternoon._ I guess you really do go all-out for those undercover jobs, huh? _He huffed in the sardonic amusement of those for whom the the world holds no more secrets and hitched his backpack more firmly against his shoulder._

What do mean by that? _you demanded. Urgency made your voice sharp, and the kid shrank against his front door._

Nothin', man, nothin', _the kid squeaked, and squeezed his eyes shut, sure you were about to beat the shit out of him for the crime of a smartass remark._

_You forced yourself to relax before the kid shit himself and bolted inside._ Relax, kid. I just need some information.

_His hunched shoulders did not straighten, and he eyed you warily from beneath bangs that would've seen Mike dragging him in for a haircut._ You some kind of cop?

A Fed, actually. _It was close enough. The last thing you needed was some kid blabbing to anyone who would listen about government spooks in the neighborhood. Langley might be a company town, but it needed civilians in order to maintain its cover of just another Anytown, USA, and they tended to get twitchy when the men in black suits and mirrored shades left their billion-dollar corral._

_The kid blanched._ Look, I didn't do anything. The cameras are just really easy to hack, I mean, seriously, you wouldn't believe how shitty the security is, my little cousin could get in with his Leapfrog, _he gabbled, and his eyes grew wide and wet with panicked tears._ I swear, officer, I wasn't trying to do anything shady. I just wanted to see some chicks, you know? _He shuffled and shimmied, a toddler trying not to make go-go in his training pants._

_You blinked at the flood of adolescent terror._ I just want to know why you think I was undercover.

Well, you were, weren't you? You're a Fed, that's what you guys do, right? I mean, I saw you at that crappy motel where all the hookers and winos go. Or someone who looked like you, _he amended hastily when your eyes narrowed._

What crappy hotel?

The one next to the taco place where they use dogs in the meat. _The kid was doing a cha-cha of terror now, and snot dripped from the end of his nose and glistened on his upper lip._

Dogs in the meat, _you repeated incredulously, but you thought you knew the one he meant. It was dingy and small and wedged between a barber shop with rusted bars on the windows and a liquor store with the same that did a brisk business, but you doubted the neighborhood pooches had anything to fear._

Yeah, my friend, Chandler says he saw a skinned weiner do-

_You held up a hand to forestall any further scandalous revelations about the culinary practices of the taco shop._ I don't give a rat's- _You made a quick amendment to your forthcoming statement._ -I don't care about the taco shop. All I care about is the guy you think you saw at this motel.

_The kid worried his lower lip with braced teeth._ He looked like you, only skinnier, and he wasn't dressed like my principal. _He eyed your suit and polished dress shoes with disdain._

Kid, _you thought,_ if your principal is making enough to dress like this, then why are you living in this dump? _But a debate over his living arrangements and your sartorial splendor was the last thing on your mind._ This guy? _you prompted._

Like I said, he looked like you, only not lame. _The kid thought for a moment._ He was walking funny, though, like he was wasted or sick or something. He had on these cargo pants and a brown shirt.

_Kirill. On a bender, no doubt, pissed at the world that had wronged him and drowning his sorrows in whatever vodka he could get his hands on._

Of course he is. He just lost the family he managed to fashion against all odds, _your conscience pointed out ruthlessly._ And it wasn't the world who took it from him. It was you.

_You thought of Kirill, resisting every impulse of his heart as a sobbing Nera reached for him, and of his hand on Siberius' cheek in their swaybacked bed in that Alaskan cabin where you found your strength again._

Show me, _you said brusquely._

Show you what? _came the blank reply, and the kid did his best to become one with the door._

The footage, _you snapped._

_The kid quailed._ I don't have it, _he squeaked._ It's not like he was a hot chick.

_You scoffed, but you could hardly fault his logic. You settled from wringing the probable name and general location from him before he scuttled inside like a mouse escaping the sharp and bloody claws of the cat and slammed the door in your face, and then you left him to his terror and the eventual resumption of his dirty, hormonal little business and went to take care of your own. You headed for the grim, grotty outskirts of the city, where those who weren't useful to their indifferent country eked out a living by hook or crook or the sale of their bodies to wealthy businessmen in search of a little adventure before they headed back to the safer realms of their white picket fences. No glass and steel and ornate wrought iron from the colonial period here, just dirty concrete and rusted grillwork and Lexan in the windows to give the occupants a fighting chance against a hail of lead that carried with it miserable lethality rather than historical value._

_The motel was as seedy and dispirited as its neighbors, its uninviting paint pocked and stained and the color of raw sewage, its windows blighted by cracked panes and iron bars that sloughed rust in large, scabrous flakes. The fire escape looked fragile and unsteady as it listed against the side of the building like a drunk, and garbage spilled from the overfilled dumpsters and blew across the cracked asphalt like tumbleweeds--plastic bags slimed with grease and mouthfuls of saliva and flat Coke and pages from a discarded newspaper and yawping takeout containers that made their journeys with the forlorn scrape of cheap styrofoam._

This place just screams bedbug chalet, _you thought dismally as you surveyed it from the parking lot of a small bodega across the street whose squat proprietor eyed you from behind the barred windows with simmering suspicion._

Probably thinks I'm here to do a deal, _you thought with wry amusement._ Wouldn't be surprised to get a visit from the local boys if I sit here too long, and won't that be fun? Trying to explain that my ex-Russian assassin twin brother is in the flophouse across the street, mourning the family that the government whisked away to an undisclosed location and probably getting scabies, bedbugs, and the clap at the same time. Won't the inevitable psych hold be a high old time?

_You circled the neighborhood a few times but figured that made it look like you were casing your next score, so you pulled into a space in front of the motel and hoped your car looked sufficiently governmental and forbidding to deter any carjacking hopefuls. The motel loomed, dour and unwelcoming, and you wrinkled your nose at the stink of hotpatch and sour beer and stale cigarettes that rose from the asphalt._

You couldn't've found somewhere nicer to hole up, _bratishka? you thought mournfully as you surveilled the double row of narrow doors fronted by an anorexic iron rail between the first and second level, but you knew even as you asked it that he couldn't. He was a creature of habit, trained by a succession of masters to seek out the grotty warrens of the slums and dilapidated outskirts to which the world shunted its garbage. Cops and spooks in nice suits and patent-leather shoes polished to a spit shine seldom ventured into the human sewers to save those who were already lost, and the shadows hid the scrapes and the bruises and the teeth spat onto the pavement with a defeated_ clack. 

_And even if that weren't true, even if he'd been fortunate enough to be shaped by men who saw him as a valuable commodity to be protected and burnished to a high shine and sacrificed only as a matter of last resort and not by those who saw him as a tool to be used and broken and tossed aside when he was too broken or headfucked to be their bogeyman, he'd still crawl into a shithole like this because he thinks it's what he's worth. Why should a piece of shit who let his family be taken away have anything better?_

Shit, _you breathed, and killed the ignition. You sat in the mounting heat and listened to the engine tick and let the sweat bead at your nape and prickle in your armpits, an act of meager penance for the wrong you had done to save your own._

_It wasn't hard to suss out which room your brother had claimed for his own. It was the one everyone else avoided, even the hollow-eyed wraiths with sunken cheeks and the compulsive itch not even a needle could soothe. It was the one nearest the dumpster on the second level, its limp, too-thin curtains drawn against prying eyes and the intrusion of light._

I wouldn't go up there if I was you, _slurred a hooker who looked like she needed a booster seat to drive and whose perfume smelled of funeral-home roses._ Guy's crazy. _She scratched dreamily at the inside of her elbow, and on the pasty flesh of her bicep, a ringlet of bruises bloomed like curling ivy. In the sick, dismal recesses of your mind that knew just how deep your brother's darkness ran, you wondered if he'd been the one to put it there._

Hey, you look like him, _she called to your back as you headed for the concrete steps that led to the second floor and the door to the lion's den._

_There was no answer when you knocked on the door, but you could hear the muted murmur of the TV and a furtive creak, as though someone had risen from the bed to peer balefully at the door._

Please don't let him decide to shoot first and give a shit later, _you prayed as you counted off the seconds, and in your mind's eye, you saw the door disintegrating in a hail of copper-jacketed rounds as Kirill delivered his answer center mass. The first round would count, and the others would be for good measure, and you'd die looking at the rotted overhang and the termites that squirmed like maggots while the tweaking hooker wailed that she told you not to go up there, man._

I wouldn't mess with that motherfucker, _advised the rheumy-eyed inhabitant of the next room over, and he shook his head dolefully._ That dude be _fucked_ up. That's one cold motherfucker, there. _When you persisted in your folly and knocked again, he let out a disgusted huff that carried the distinct whiff of stale morning breath and rotgut hooch, stood, brushed off his knees with unruffled dignity, and retreated into his room. The turning of the lock and the scrape of the setting chain against cheap wood was the portentous rumble of distant thunder in your ears._

Kirill, it's me, _you informed the door, and you were so braced for a lack of response that you were startled when the door flew open to reveal Kirill, white as paste and wreathed in a fine sheen of sour sweat that made your nose wrinkle._

Did you find my family? _he rasped, and swayed on his feet, eyes bruised and sunken and glassy._

Drugs, _you thought with dismay._ He said fuck the vodka and went for something a little stronger. Smack, maybe, a little oblivion in a dirty needle. There's never been a whiff of anything but booze in his files, but if you're going to go sailing off the wagon, losing your family while your big brother stands there with his dick in his hands is a perfect time to start. _But no. There was no stink of burnt tar and warm metal wafting from the room, just the juniper and rubbing-alcohol astringency of vodka and the low, noxious reek of sweat and and the high, sweet stink of an abscessed tooth, the latter of which was coming from Kirill._

Not drugs, thank fuck, but it sure as shit isn't good, either, _you thought, and breathed through your mouth to blunt the smell._ No, _you admitted ruefully, and the anguish you saw in his face in the instant before it hardened drove the breath from you and the strength from your knees. It wasn't Kirill Orlov you saw in that moment, Russian assassin of stony discipline and cold hatred, but Kiryusha, little brother who still believed you could fix anything._

Then fuck you, _he said flatly, and made to slam the door._

_Your hand shot out to stay the door, and you stepped forward to force him back. A grim voice in the back of your head whispered that if Kirill still had the strength for a fight, you were fucked, but the panicky voice of the older brother screamed that if you let him close the door, you'd lose him forever. He'd either bolt again, this time to a place not on the camera-creeping itinerary of horny thirteen-year-olds on the road to sexual deviance, or he'd die. The next time anybody opened this door, it would be to bring him out in a glorified Hefty bag._

I can't let you do that. _You wanted to be kind, to be gentle with a heart and soul already bruised and broken by too much cruelty and indifference, but Kirill had been too long estranged from such consideration, and he suspected only deceit and further betrayal. He swore under his breath and aimed a forearm at tour intruding face, and only muscle memory kept you from a broken nose or a crushed orbital bone._

Kiryusha, stop, _you pleaded._ I'm not here to hurt you.

_He bared his teeth at you, pallid face greasy with sweat._ Oh, now you give a shit if you hurt me, _he snarled, and his breath washed over your face, stale and sour and hot with vodka._

And fever, _you realized as you crowded him and goaded him further into the room in an attempt to minimize collateral damage and another embarrassing evening with the boys in blue._ He's burning up, a hundred and three, easy, maybe higher, and if his brain wasn't boiling in his head, he'd've dropped me like a sack of shit by now.

Big fucking man, _he seethed as he backed further into the room, stepping on old burger wrappers and a rumpled shirt as he retreated. His ass scraped the back of the room's sole chair, a spindly, wooden affair that would've looked right at home in the living room of the discerning--yet upright--Puritan housewife. He staggered, legs loose and unruly as they searched for purchase on a perfectly flat surface, and you knew then that he wasn't just sick, but dangerously ill, possibly even dying, because the man his masters had made of him was one step below a goddamned cyborg, relentless as onrushing death and impervious to pain or weakness. Bastard had survived a wreck that should've killed him on impact, had gone on breathing for hours and days despite all the dire predictions that he would not make it through the night, and he bulled his way through a recovery that should've taken twice as long and brought him to his knees from the pain without a whimper, and now he could barely keep his feet and was blinking at you with the dazed, uncomprehending fury of a rabid dog._

I'm not here to hurt you, _you soothed._ I just want to talk to you.

_He snorted._ Talk. _His lips puckered as though to spit, and he listed slowly to the right._ Yes, you will talk. You will talk so much that my ears are filled with your mindless fucking bullshit, and my head pounds. You will give me excuses and apologies and tell me that I must understand, that it was for the good of all, that you had no choice, and they will still be gone, and I will still be fucking here in this shithole- _His mouth and throat spasmed, and you were sure he was going to blow chunks all over the filthy, patchy industrial carpet, but all that emerged was a glottal, strangled rush of air. He would be damned if he would let you see his agony._

I think your head is pounding already, _you thought with a pang of sympathy as you watched him sway on his feet. Sweat beaded at his temple and hairline, and that stale, sickly reek ripened in the airless little room._

I'm not going to talk and talk at you, _you lied. He had, in fact, enumerated the major points of your speech, much to your chagrin._ I just wanted to make sure you were okay. It's not left you left a note in the wreckage of my basement.

_If you were expecting a flicker of regret at the mention of his impromptu remodeling project, you didn't get it. Instead, eyes that were normally a light hazel went dark as the murky waters of the tidal flats and hard as obsidian, and you knew that you didn't want whatever was shifting in those depths to break the surface._

Whatever he says next will be something you can't take back, a line between Before and After that you can't erase once you cross it. _You steeled yourself and hoped the memories you had of him during his brief redemption would be enough, would not turn sharp and bitter with the passage of time._

I had to leave your house, _he said brusquely, and fell silent, but you sensed the rest of it behind his teeth, taut and bloody and so painfully sharp._ Before I did something I could never undo.

_But Kirill was yet Kiryusha beneath the hard exterior, and he kept his secret, and you loved him for it, so fiercely that your eyes burned and your chest ached._

I know you're pissed, and you should be, but this place is a dump. I'm getting scabies just looking at it. Why don't we get out of here, get some food that doesn't come in a bottle, and come up with a plan?

_But though you brother may have loved you enough not to take that final, irrevocable step, he was in no mood for your pitiful sop._ Plan? _he scoffed._ What plan? We have no idea where they are. What are you going to do, Viko? Track their license plates to a conveniently inconspicuous building and retrieve my family as easily as you get a gallon of that disgusting two-percent swill your family likes?

What's wrong with two percent? _you heard yourself squawking defensively before you realized how stupid you sounded._

They're not stupid enough to keep those plates on the cars, and you know damn well the only way to track them is through an internal database to which your access has been restricted, temporarily or permanently.

Temporarily, _you grumbled, and why in the hell did you sound like a truculent twelve-year-old?_

_Kirill snorted and nodded as though that were what he'd expected._ They could be anywhere. If they wanted to get cute, they could be in Gitmo, in the rooms I'm not sure the President knows about, _he stormed._

Is there a reason for them to be? _you ventured._

_Another incredulous snort._ You mean besides the fact that they're not human? No. _Anyone else would've believed him, but he was, as Mike had called him once, the other half of your soul, and you heard the infinitesimal hesitation._

What aren't you telling me? _But that was too dangerous a question for the tinderbox this room had become. He was too volatile, too raw from the wound you had inflicted. If you pushed, the odds were better than good that the secret that brotherly love had kept behind his teeth would slip its fragile tether, and any chance of going back to the way things were would disappear._ Then they're probably just at Area 51, _you said lamely, and winced. Kirill did not smile._

As for food, what do you propose? That we go back to your house and have a nice casserole, maybe a little wine? Just sit there at your heirloom table while Drushka dutifully eats what Michelle puts in front of him because he is a good little soldier like his father and Tati whines because it isn't chicken nuggets in the shape of dinosaur as imagined by a man with one eye and severe astigmatism? _A humorless twist of dry lips, and sweat poured down his face._

_You shrugged, too preoccupied by worry for him and the desire to flee that dirty fleapit to realize what was coming._ It doesn't have to be casserole. We could grill some steaks or chops or order some takeout. Thai from that place you like. I'm sure the kids would mind ea-

I don't want anything from you! _It was a primal roar so loud and fierce that he nearly toppled himself with the force of it._ I don't want your wife's shitty casserole that tastes like a Bering Strait fisherman smells. I want Siberius' food that tastes like an angel's cunt and sticks to your ribs and makes you feel like you've actually eaten. I want _Siberius! His voice cracked, and his breath came in ragged pants, as though the act of speech was a test of strength. He gazed at you with anguished, fever-glazed eyes._ I want Nera. I want her authoritative opinions on blankets and the best colors for butterflies. I want the little noises she makes when she's feeling happy and safe. I want the scratch of her pencils on her sketchpad.

I-

They took care of you! _he thundered on. He gave not a damn for anything that you had to say. This was his say, and he meant to have it._ Siberius followed me into that hole in the ass of the world and did what he never wanted to do again, and he helped me pull you out. He could've left you. He could've left us both, and he didn't. He hunted for you and fished for you and fed you. He took you in because you were my brother, and you fucking sold him.

I didn't sell anything, _you shot back. That this was your fault, you would not deny, but you'd be damned if you'd let him say you'd done it on purpose, a tidy act of expediency you'd had planned all along._ I don't know how they found us, but it wasn't me. Maybe they were searching for me on facial rec, and the minute we got in range of a camera, they sent out the goon squad, but I didn't call them, and I sure as fuck didn't tell them to sweep up your family.

Then why wouldn't you let me save them?

There were too many. Christ, Kirill, do you really think you could've taken them all?

With you by my side, yes, _he spat, and the betrayal in it harrowed your heart._

My family-

You still have your family! _Another howl to the unheeding heavens._ You will go home to them and love them. Mine is gone, and we both know that if we find them, it will be facedown in a ditch with a bullet at the base of their skulls. _He ran his fingers over his close-cropped hair, and it was then you understood the smell._

Shit, Kirill, what the hell did you do? _You closed the gap between you and reached for his hand, which was covered in a loose bandage gone a pale yellow that reminded you of raw chicken fat._

It doesn't matter, _he snapped, and balled his hand into a protective fist._

The hell it doesn't, _you retorted._ Let me see, dammit.

Go fuck yourself. _The snarl of a cornered animal, and he shoved you away with his other hand._

Kirill, dammit, stop. Let me see, you asshole.

_What ensued might have been funny if you weren't so terrified, so sure that what happened in that room was for all the marbles. You fought your brother for the first time since you were ten years old and scuffling on the living-room rug in that small flat in Berlin, your father an indistinct, undershirted shadow on the sofa and your mother lost to the more peaceful world of her art studio. But you were both much stronger and more ruthless now, and there was no looming father with the unspoken promise of a belt or a backhand to break it up or the voice of a mother to urge restraint._

_It was quick and brutal and joyless, a tangle of limbs and adrenaline and desperation. He swore and scratched and bit with remorseless ferocity, and you marshalled every scrap of your training to parry the blows and the invective spewed like venom as he lashed out with fists and feet and pistoning knees, and when it was over and Kirill was pinned beneath you on the bed with his uninjured arm twisted behind his back and hitched toward his nape at an unyielding angle that promised a fracture if he persisted in his rebellion, you felt, not triumphant, but battered and old and miserable, a monster who had forsaken the justice of his cause._

Fuck you, _Kirill spat into sheets that stank of sweat and uneasy dreams, and his spine bowed beneath your knee._ Worthless, sellout piece of shit. _Pus oozed from beneath the bandage on his hand, and with your new and closer vantage point and the dubious aid of the weak light that spilled over the bed like old urine, you saw the angry, ominous redness that snaked from his palm to his puffy wrist and crept up his arm with implacable, insidious determination._

Infected all to hell. Might even be septic. If I don't get him to a hospital tonight, he's dead.

It's always been easy to sell me out, hasn't it, Viko? _he raged, voice hoarse and ravaged and still so full of lashing hatred._ The first time you did it, you got your happy family. The second time, you got to keep them. _He twisted beneath you, risk of greenstick fracture be damned, an ember smoldering beneath his sweat-soaked clothes, and his arm gave an ominous creak._

Stop. Please stop. _It was a ragged plea, and it took all of your flagging strength to keep him pinned._

_He panted into the sheets._ What's the matter, Viko, now that you've come this far, you can't bring yourself to finish it? You'd snap my neck if you had the balls. Do you have balls, Viko, or did your country take those, too? _He fell silent for a moment, breath a plosive flutter over the sheets. Then,_ Or maybe you gave those to your wife. _It was meant to sting, to provoke, but you were too tired, too wracked with guilt._

_You thought of him that night in the CIA hospital, snared in his bed by the traction hoist that held his leg together. So full of rage and bravado and a fear he could not admit, and yet, all of that fell away the moment he saw you. Suddenly, he was thirty-seven going on ten, and the man that had made widows and orphans of God knows how many was crying like a baby, so hard you were afraid he was going to choke on his own tears, and he reached for you with the tremulous eagerness of a toddler. His fingers fisted in the fabric of your shirt with manic intensity, and his breath was hot against your neck._

Viko... Viko. _Not spat like a curse, but gulping and disbelieving, as though an angel had appeared from on High and offered him the fondest wish of his childhood heart. Trusting and relieved, a prodigal son who has found his way home._

_Your fingers prickled with the memory of his close-cropped hair and the curve of his skull as you held him and let him sob into your neck. Even though it had proven its mettle by keeping his brain intact and unscathed despite a high-speed meeting with a concrete divider, it had felt as fragile as birdbone beneath your palm._

_You released your grip on his arm and sat back on his rump, and you reached up to stroke that same curve. He twisted from you as though your touch harrowed and scalded, salt poured into his gaping wounds, and you dropped your hand._

You need to go to the hospital, get that hand patched up, _you said dully._ It's infected.

I don't give a fuck, _he snarled thickly._

_You dismounted him and stood beside the bed, wincing gingerly at a vehement throb of protest from the kneecap he'd tried so vigorously to dislocate during your scrum._ I don't give a shit. You're going. How you go is up to you.

You really think you can make me go if I don't want to? _He eyed you from his belly, gelid and appraising as a cornered weasel._

Probably not, at least not without both of us needing a bus, _you thought darkly, but the bulk of winning a battle was believing you could._ I don't know, but I'm willing to find out. Come on, _you cajoled, suddenly so tired that it was an effort to stand._ If you die in here, you'll never know if you could've gotten them back. What if you just give up and die, and they're out there somewhere waiting for you? You really going to let them spend the rest of their lives wondering what happened or thinking that you just didn't want them anymore now that you got what you wanted?

_He was on his feet in an instant, so close that you could feel the fever radiating from him like a lover's breath against your skin._ They are all that I want from this world, _he hissed. He blinked sweat from his eyes and slalomed drunkenly, fingers splaying against the air as though to steady him._

_You clapped him on the shoulder._ Well, you're not going to get them back by feeling sorry for yourself in here, _you said, and immediately regretted it. If Kirill decided to take offense, you'd be right back where you started, and he might just decide to tell you what he thought of that particular bit of sniffy judgment by trying to part your hair with the table lamp or collapse your trachea with a well-timed jab._

_Fortunately for you and the future relationship of the sons of Rebecca Orlova, Kirill was too tired to renew the fight. He spared you a sullen glower and shuffled to the door, shoulders slumped and gait unsteady, and his wounded hand opened and closed, opened and closed, a beached starfish breathing its last on the damp sand. You thought of that same hand as it caressed Siberius' face, vital and reverent and impossibly tender._

I'm sorry, _bratishka, you thought as he opened the door and lurched outside into the cooler, marginally-cleaner air._ I promise I'll make this right.

_You kept him in front of you as you descended the stairs, lest he be seized by a final fit of pique and push you to the bottom. You'd lie there in a twisted tangle of limbs and broken neck, and he'd leave you to the mercies of Junior Miss Crackhead, step over you, and finish his dying without your interference. The crackhead in question gave you both a wide berth, though she peered up at the abandoned room, worrying a ragged lower lip pale with dehydration and flecked with dry, split skin and brushing a strand of thin, blonde hair behind her ear._

Get the fuck out of here. You don't belong here, _Kirill growled as he stalked toward your car, and she bolted like a doe spooked from the brush._

The old man's going to be pissed about the room. _Kirill sagged against the side of the car as he waited for you to unlock the door._

You weren't worried about that when you were trying to kick my ass, _you groused._

I wasn't trying anything, _came the matter-of-fact reply._ I was. And I don't give a shit about it now. _He was an alarming grey, and his head lolled against the side of the SUV despite the fact that the black paint was hotter than the surface of Venus._

No, but I might. And I'm sure Mike might when I tell her I had to pay for this mess, _you thought._

_You herded Kirill into the passenger seat, where he promptly collapsed against the door, and then you hurried around to the driver's side and and slid into the driver's seat to turn on the ignition and fiddle with the A/C._

You gonna be all right-, _you started to ask, and then decided that you didn't care about settling the bill. Kirill was going downhill fast, and you suspected if your credit card got anywhere near this place, it wouldn't be long before it was paying for strip clubs and porn sites of dubious legality. You pulled your other leg inside the car and closed the door._ Fuck it.

_A feeble snort from the passenger seat._ It seems I've made a criminal of you at last. A petty thief, no less.

Shut up, _you muttered as you threw the SUV into reverse._ Besides, unless Little Miss Crackhead drops a dime, they won't come looking until tomorrow. Nothing says I can't settle up before then. With cash, _you added silently._

Crackwhore, _Kirill corrected ungraciously._

She's a kid.

Still a whore.

Still lucid enough to be your uncharitable self, _you noted dourly._ Bet you'll be a real treat at the hospital.

And a delight he was. He answered the intake nurse's questions as though it were a black-ops interrogation and showed himself a paragon of modern chivalry by calling them bitches and cunts and whores. You pleaded with him to stop being an asshole, but he was determined to spread the misery. Why not when the world cared so little for his? You could only apologize to the harried and insulted nurses and explain that he'd suffered a severe trauma and was likely semi-delirious. It was little consolation when he was spitting and swearing and throwing obscene gestures, and it wasn't long before their patience was exhausted and they gave him a wide berth and a heavy sedative to go with his massive dose of I.V. antibiotics.

They were less than thrilled to admit him and subject themselves to his petulant venom, but they did, and he was tranked to the gills when they rolled him into his room, his breathing heavy and his eyes rolling in his head.

You're sure he doesn't have a history of substance abuse? _the puffy-eyed and haggard attending pressed as the nurses checked his lines._

Not as long as I've known him, _you answered._ Why?

I had to pump him full of enough Valium to bring down a horse, and he's still not entirely out.

You looked at Kirill, who was limp and slurring incomprehensibly beneath the sheets, hand pawing stupidly at them, his eyes rolling back in his head.

He's always been a tough bastard, _you supplied._ A few years back, he suffered a wreck that should've killed him.

Mmm. That explains the head. _The doctor pantomimed the crease in the left side of Kirill's head, the one he took pains to conceal as much as possible by growing his hair._

He's got rods and pins in his leg, too. _You tapped your right shin._

And you're sure there's no chance of substance abuse? Injuries like this are common with people who abuse painkillers, particularly opiates. They're so numb they don't feel the initial injury, and then they're so high that they don't care.

_You thought of that shattered bathroom mirror, that bright splash of red in the sink below it, an offering to appease an angry god._

If he is addicted, we can get him help. _The doctor's voice, so gentle, and smoothed by years of saying the same thing to countless others._

I appreciate the concern, but he's lived with me for eighteen months, and the only things in his medicine cabinet are aspirin for the hangovers, shaving cream, and more condoms than should be allowed by law. He's just had a rough few days.

I'll just bet, _the doctor's expression said, but the next words out of his mouth were,_ If he changes his mind, or if you have questions or anything else you want to tell us, just tell a nurse.

He thinks I'm full of shit, _you realized dully._ Or that I'm in denial, some sorry asshole who can't accept that his twin brother is a junkie. He just lost his family, _you wanted to shout._ My fucking coworkers turned up in my driveway before I had the chance to park the car and tore them away from him. People have gone apeshit for less. He's not some strung-out junkie who'd open your guts for a fix. He's just had enough.

_But an outburst like that would lump you in with him and kill any chance you had of getting him out of here without a psych eval and an official arrest record for assault and disorderly conduct, and so you swallowed your frustration and asked,_ How's his hand?

_The doctor sighed._ I think we caught it in time. Frankly, I'm surprised he was as coherent as he was. Another twelve hours, and it would've hit his bloodstream, caused organ failure. We've irrigated, disinfected, and lightly dressed the wound, and the antibiotics should clear up the infection.

You didn't stitch it?

I want to let it breathe overnight. If it shows improvement, we'll close it up in the morning.

So he's going to be here overnight?

_The doctor nodded._ Two nights, maybe three. He needs a three-day course of I.V. antibiotics, so unless your wife's a nurse...? _Was that a note of wistful hope you heard?_

Sorry. Lawyer.

Ah. _Definite disappointment. No doubt he was envisioning the next seventy-two hours with a belligerent, foul-mouthed asshole who took sadistic delight in reducing nurses and perky young candy stripers to tears._

He's not usually like this, _you wanted to say, but the truth was, you didn't know how he was, not anymore, anymore than you'd known the man he'd become in the years of your separation when you'd blinked down at those black-and-white surveillance photos and fought to draw air into your stunned lungs. You'd been lost in that lightless hole for eight months, squirming on that dirty, reeking concrete floor like a grub in search of damp soil, and who knows what happened to him during that time? Maybe demons he thought he'd buried had clawed their way to the surface to reclaim their places inside his head. Maybe all the progress he'd made in joining the civilized masses had fallen away when he'd seen that empty SUV and that bag of groceries on the asphalt. Maybe he'd let the monster loose to save you, and now he can't find a way or the will to drive it back into its flimsy cage._

_You looked at Kirill, slack and muttering in his bed, his rage and grief temporarily smothered by the sedative they jabbed into him in a fit of impatient irritation. He looked back at you, but his gaze was distant and indifferent, fogged by delirium and dope._

Thanks, doc, _you said, though the words were bitter on your tongue._

_The bobbing nod of a tom turkey on the strut. The doctor spared Kirill a last look and mused,_ It's funny, you know? The people God decides to spend a charmed life on.

_You weren't sure how to take that, though it carried the whiff of insult. You let it go and watched him stride down the ward to attend more grateful patients, and when he had turned the corner, you went into the room and stood by the bedrail._

_The nurse spared you a wary, appraising glance._ You must be the good twin, _she said drily._

The rest of the world thinks so, too, _you thought. You mustered a wan smile in the interests of keeping yourself in her good books, and when she had followed the good doctor on to the next appointed round, it was just you and Kirill and the glum sterility of the room._

_Kirill was too far under to be coherent, and he moved through a world you couldn't see, muttering softly to himself and pawing dreamily at the bedclothes. Now and again, the fingers of his wounded hand twitched and curled, and you grimly marveled that the pain didn't bring him screaming and swearing from his blissful tiptoe through the tulips._

I'm going to get your family back, _you murmured._ I promise, okay? _And because there was no one to see, no one to sneer and snicker and wonder if you'd gone soft, you carded you fingers through the soft stubble of his hair._

_He sniffed and snuffled and turned into the touch with the instinctive, greedy need of an infant, and your throat tightened._

_You took a deep breath to steady yourself and cleared your aching throat._ You just hang tight, _bratishka_. And don't be such an asshole to the nurses.

_You left with the lump still in your throat and the soft rasp of his hair still prickling in your fingers. Your battered knee throbbed in time to your heartbeat all the way home, and by the time you hobbled to the front door, your ribs and kidneys had joined the chorus of your miseries._

You found him, _was all Mike said when you eased through the door in an attempt to hide the worst of it from the kids, an attempt that was immediately severely tested by an exuberant Tati barreling into your midsection for a hug._

Yep. _It was the best you could manage with all the air being driven from your lungs, and it took all your military training not to yelp as your loving daughter, intent on sharing her effusive zest for life, unwittingly dug her small arms into the freshest and tenderest of your bruises. You ate dinner only because it would worry Mike and the kids if you didn't, and you were damned if you could taste anything but the gritty sourness of that hotel room. And all the while, Mike watched you from the corner of her eye._

You all right? _she asked when the kids were in bed and it was just you and her and a show on the TV that neither of you was really watching. She smelled of Tati's cotton-candy bubble bath and a lingering hint of the perfume that never failed to quicken your pulse and make your mouth go dry._

_You opened your mouth to tell her that you were fine, as automatic as breathing and the safest course when your job demanded a choice between secrecy and lies. To your surprise, what emerged was,_ Not really, _followed by a mirthless croak._

You want to talk about it? _It was what she always asked when all your skin was torn away and there was no place to hide, and you loved her for it, blinding and absolute, but this was a truth you could not tell. How could you tell her, this strong, beautiful woman who had yoked herself to you with joy on her face and rice in her hair, that your world had come undone? How could you tell her that even though you knew you'd made the only choice you could and would make it again, you felt like a bastard and a traitor and a monster who had destroyed his brother's happiness and sent a little girl who had already lived with too much to face God knows what to keep your own? You couldn't, and so you shook your head and kissed her forehead and promised you'd come to bed soon, and then you snagged the bottle of scotch from the cabinet and plodded into the basement to futz and bumble through the wreckage. But you couldn't fix it any more than you could fix your baby brother, and so you ended up just sitting on the bottom step and nursing the bottle until the world went soft at the edges and Mike's voice calling you to bed was a remote and illusory as the call of a siren on the tranquil sea._

_You went to work with a dull throb in your head and the sour grit of aspirin on your tongue, and when you stopped in to see Kirill on your lunch break, the fluorescent lights of the ward made your eyes water and your stomach slalom uneasily in its moorings. Matters only deteriorated when you neared his room and heard the sharp clatter of crashing plastic and your brother's voice, low and venomous._

Fuck this swill. And fuck you, too, you sneering little cunt.

_You entered the room in the aftermath of his tantrum and found Kirill sitting up in bed like a peevish vulture, shoulders hunched and arms folded. His lips were pulled back from his teeth in a contemptuous sneer, and his eyes were alight with cold malice. His hapless lunch was scattered across the formerly spotless floor, the contents of his fruit cup splattered on the foot of the bed and the narrow, Formica bureau that squatted beneath the arm-mounted flatscreen that hung from the ceiling like a spider on a strand of spidersilk. Leaves of dispirited lettuce clung to the linoleum, and corn kernels took refuge beneath the bed and along the vinyl baseboards. The main course, a soggy egg-salad sandwich that made your lips pucker in a reflexive moue of revulsion, hung over the lip of the tray, which had somehow landed face-up halfway between the foot of the bed and the bureau._

_And the nurse, poor thing, was rooted to the spot, her scrubs spattered with corn and corn syrup and a fine spray of runny egg salad. She was young, fresh out of nursing school by the look of her, and she blinked at her recalcitrant patient in pinched dismay, lips parted in shock._

Bet they didn't teach you about this in nursing school, huh, kid? _you thought with morose sympathy as she tore her gaze from a smirking Kirill and surveyed the mess at her feet with mounting despair._ I bet you thought it was going to be all smiling kids and grateful little old ladies who'd pat your hand and tell you how wonderful you were. The worst you thought you'd see would be shit and piss and blood and a little spew, and the most unruly patient you'd see was a guy on a drunk or some teenager on a bad magic carpet ride. Phrases like _uncooperative patient_ were just words in a textbook so new the spine cracked when you opened it, a concept to be memorized if you wanted to ace your exam.

And now Kirill has turned your tidy little world upside down. _You were tempted to shake your head in knowing commiseration._ Trust me, sweetheart, you're hardly the first, and I can't promise you you'll be the last, either.

Am I interrupting? _you asked drily to announce your arrival._

_The nurse might've been young, but she was also, as it turned out, determined, and you saluted her moxie when she straightened to her full height, did her best to smooth her soiled scrubs and replied with frosty dignity,_ Apparently, he wanted Perrier with his table service.

You might just make it, _you thought._

Did you find my family? _Kirill, still scowling from his bed, and yet, for all his anger, you heard the fragile thread of forlorn hope._

No, _you admitted,_ but I'm trying.

_But the attempt was irrelevant; it was the result that mattered, and when you admitted that you had not brought what his heart sought, he shut down. He settled beneath the thin sheet and rolled to face the window, and he refused to speak even after the nurse had departed and an orderly had appeared in her stead to clean up the mess. He blinked through your increasingly-desperate conversational gambits and the hushed sussuration of the hard-bristled mop as it swept the remains of his spurned lunch into the dustpan, and when he still refused to speak after this interloper, too, had taken his leave, you knew you had to do something, even if it meant you lost your job or got exiled to the field office in Dubuque. This wasn't a petty sulk he would forget in a day or so, maybe a week if he was feeling particularly pissy, but the white flag of surrender. He had tasted happiness and stability and had it torn from him by an unseen bureaucrat and a cadre of goons, and he had simply, quietly given up._

_It stung to know that his love for you was not enough, but you could hardly raise a cry against it when you'd gone and made a life for yourself that had nothing to do with him, fallen in love and gotten married and raised two kids in a little gingerbread house with a lush green yard and white-picket fence that met all the zoning codes and HOA guidelines. You knew what he was missing, what he was_ mourning _as he showed you his back and gazed out the window and saw nothing but the movie playing on an endless loop inside his head. Siberius, loving him in the pre-dawn light with a sinuous roll of his hips. Nera, scampering through the woods that had surrounded their snug Alaskan cabin, a bright flash of color as she flitted through the trees to follow birds or butterflies or root for mushrooms in the soft, damp soil, lips pursed in concentration and eyes bright with curiosity. Siberius, cooking him a breakfast to be savored as he sipped coffee strong enough to grow hair on your chest and watched the sun rise above the fog-shrouded pines. Nera, head bent over her sketchbook as she worked, her movements precise yet unhurried, crooning and chirping softly to herself as she gave shape to the world inside her head. Siberius, face blank as he stood among the swarm of agents, doing the calculus every soldier knows. Siberius, getting into the SUV because he saw the truth Kirill's heart did not want to accept. Nera, stretching for him until her spine cracked and popped, and her wail of crushed betrayal when he dropped his outstretched hand and let her be carried away. An endless loop of what he had lost, and beyond that, the relentless lash of what might now be because he had failed them._

And you've got a movie like that all your own, don't you? _your conscience whispered as you watched Kirill's ribs rise and fall and your own ached in sympathy beneath your dress shirt._ It played inside your head every day of those eight months you spent in no-man's land, getting your nuts jolted by an Everready battery while some dude smoked Camels and chided you to be careful you didn't crack your pearly whites and picking weevils from what little food they tossed into your hole. It played in the dark of your cell, equal parts torture and comfort while your skin itched with lice and your own filth and sweat ran down the crack of your ass. Your family as you'd left them on that hot, innocent afternoon, when the only worry in your head was getting home in time for dinner, which was Mike's chicken casserole, one of your favorites.

Mike as she padded around the house that morning, in socks and sweatshorts and an old college tee that displayed a delightful flash of midriff whenever she stretched or bent just so. Sloe-eyed and quiet because the cramps were bad and inexorably worsening, but still sharp enough to crack a joke and slap you on the ass when you ambled by to refill your coffee cup, and when she kissed you, you thought there might be more than sleep going on in your bedroom that night if you played your cards rights.

Andrew, playing soccer with Kirill on the PS4, cross-legged and bright-eyed on the couch. It was his cowlick that stuck in your mind, tickled it with the persistence of a feather. Most days, Mike could smooth it down, best it with her motherly wiles, but that day, she'd let the hair win, and the cowlick had jutted above the couch like a hunting dog's tail when it had scented its quarry. You'd ruffled in as you passed, and though he was getting so big now, it was still fine as cornsilk beneath your fingertips.

Tati, wide-eyed and running full throttle as she acted out a thousand lives in twenty minutes, a warrior princess ballerina doctor veterinarian elf queen in a tutu and a cheap tiara that had shed a few rhinestones along its fantastic journey. Bare feet slapping on the hardwood and sunny smile sticky with orange juice. Arms that hadn't quite shed all their baby fat wrapped around your knees with the giddy strength of childhood.

_Daddy! I'm a princess! I love you!_

It was her voice that scored you as you lay on your dirty mat and watched the roaches scuttle over your food bowl and the rag that might've been a blanket in another life. Guileless and clear as a cathedral bell on a spring morning, and so sure that all the tomorrows to come would hold nothing but goodness. You imagined her looking for you the night you didn't come home and all the nights thereafter, kneeling on the reading nook in the bay window that dominated the living room, the one that often doubled as Queen Tatiana's regal throne room, waiting for the headlights of your car to sweep across the driveway. Asking Mike every day if you'd come home yet and wondering why her Daddy had disappeared without a kiss goodbye.

They were the snapshots and images that held you to yourself and kept you from falling into the abyss, and now, thanks to you, Kirill has his own set to treasure. I guess a good brother always shares, and William Cooper never does anything half-assed.

_There was nothing you could say to break your brother's silence or salve your restless conscience, so you left him to his sulk and left your mind to do the quiet work of rescue. You have one chance, you thought, one chance to pull Siberius and Nera from their current state of official non-existence, and you were well aware that getting into a pissing contest with the brass might cost you your dick if you aimed it at the wrong person. Choose wrong, and those two become ghosts in the machine, names and numbers in a redacted file in the secret records facility in Quantico; Kirill drifts into himself until he disappears at the end of his gun; and you? Forget Dubuque; you get a quick and not-so-nice retirement sans party and spend the next thirty years wondering why your pension checks always seem to get lost in the system._

_The company wouldn't give so much as a dry, disinterested fuck if you went to them with some sob story about family. Families were a nuisance more often than not, an all-American obstacle to overcome when it came time to issue assignments and a weakness to be obsessed over by a brass certain that a man with a family, a man who loved, could be turned. If you went to them wringing your hands about your besotted brother and his ruined happily ever after, you'd get nothing but dispassionate gazes and a surreptitious note in both you and Kirill's files that you were soft and possibly compromised._

_But what they_ did _care about, care about with all their cold, shriveled hearts, was the awful specter of losing control of an asset that was proving itself invaluable beyond their wildest hopes, and was surprisingly cooperative despite his foul mouth and black temperament. An asset whose only loyalty to his new Yankee Doodle masters came from the fact that they held his twin in harness. An asset that had already shown he could bear that loss if the end he sought demanded it. That was the stuff of their world-shaping nightmares._

_And so when you went to them with your tale of a volatile, ex-Spetsnaz commando and FSB agent with sociopathic leanings, a knack for leaving smoldering wreckage and efficient kills in his wake, a bee in his bonnet, and nothing to lose if he decided on one last madcap ride before his appointment with the devil, they listened with exquisite attention, their faces as hard as the bronze busts that decorated their distinguished offices. No notes, of course, no inconvenient paper trail for them or paper shield for you, but you knew they would remember every detail, and that any sharp edges you left now could be used to slit your throat later._

_And so it was that two bedraggled, disoriented people turned up on your doorstep later that night, dressed in the fetching grimy grey scrubs the CIA offers its least-valued guests and smelling of must and the cheap soap dispensed in public restrooms. The bastards hadn't even bothered to drop them off in front of your house, but had left them to blunder their way through the subdivision and hope they weren't picked up for the crime of looking lost and downtrodden in an upscale neighborhood. Their arms were covered in bruises of varying shades of blue and black and sickly green from God knows how many "voluntary" blood draws and injections, and the right side of Siberius' face was swollen and bruised._

Put up a fight after all, _you mused as he blinked and shied from the soft light spilling from your doorway and Nera whimpered and clung to his side with the tenacity of a limpet._ Good. I hope you made the fuckers earn it.

_You kept your guilty fury off your face and stepped back to invite them inside. Siberius, who looked about three breaths away from dropping where he stood from exhaustion, was more than willing, but Nera, who apparently lived by the commendable philosophy of fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, go fuck yourself, balked. She stood rooted to the spot and peered up at you, wan and baleful and so wary that you wanted to throw up._

_Her small hands, mottled with bruises, signed with declarative authority, and Siberius, ever her voice, asked,_ Where's Kirill? _Judging by the tone that wavered between indignation and supplication, you suspected that it wasn't merely an act of translation._

He's- _you began slowly, unsure of what and how much to tell them. An admission that he was in the hospital might raise their suspicions and their distress, and you were afraid that Siberius might go haring off in pursuit, state of near-collapse be damned._ -Out, _you finished, and winced internally at how shifty you sounded, how much like the assholes that had done this to them, likely "for their own good."_ Yeah. Being separated from you guys hit him hard, so he took off to blow off steam and figure out a way to find you guys.

That was nearly a week ago, _Siberius pointed out in a dry croak that hurt your ears and made you hope that it was only for lack of water._

Yeah, well, you know how stubborn he is.

_A hint of smile that did not reach his eyes, which were cold and assessing._ Yes.

This is what the Necromonger looks like, _you realized with cold clarity._ This is what that bastard saw before they stuffed him into that bag and dumped him at my feet like a gift from a proud cat.

_You dropped into a crouch to get on Nera's level. She eyed you with the same studied coolness._ You look hungry, sweetheart. Are you hungry?

_Sunken, red-rimmed eyes scanned your face for signs of deceit, some evil trickery that would lead to more pain and terror and humiliation. You saw the answer in her face, but she remained obdurately silent and retreated a step._

I know I haven't made the best impression, _you told her._ But I didn't know those people were going to be here or were going to take you away. I thought we were bringing you home. Kirill was bringing you home.

_She raised an eyebrow._ Kirill lives in a dump, _she declared with the unshakeable certainty of truth._

_You smothered a bark of laughter._ Well, his place isn't the best, but it's not _that_ bad, _you replied._ It is a little small for three people, though, which is why he wanted you guys to stay here for a while until he could get a bigger place.

_No dice. What had happened to her would not be forgiven by a cheap sop of canned soup and a cheese sandwich._

_It was Boomer who saved the day, bless his doggy heart. He came waggling out the door, drawn by the voices and the possibility of a rousing game of fetch or Chase That Squirrel. He froze at the sight of strangers and let out in interrogatory boof, but his tail was wagging, and he showed no teeth. He simply licked his muzzle and looked up at you as if to say,_ What's the story, boss?

_Nera brightened, and you saw your chance._

You like him? This is Boomer. Say hi, Boom.

_Boomer was quick to oblige, loving kids as he does. He bounded up to Nera, tongue lolling and tail flogging the night air. He snuffled and snorted and pushed his head under her hand, and the wet, warm smack of his tongue on her wrist elicited a tentative giggle and a cautious pat._

He'll love you forever if you pet him. If you stay, you can get acquainted over supper, and maybe tomorrow, you can help Tati and Drew play Frisbee with him.

_A tempting offer, indeed, but Nera was stalwart._ I want Kirill.

I know. I'm going to call him once we get inside. 

Come, little bird. _Siberius coaxed her forward with a gentle nudge._ We could use a meal, and there's no reason to disappoint your new friend.

Thank you, _you thought as they dodged a frolicking Boomer and shuffled into the house. Boomer followed at a trot, tags jingling merrily as he danced around them. He was so inexhaustibly exuberant that Siberius managed the briefest of grins and reached out to ruffle his scruff._

Well met, Boomer, _he rumbled, and huffed when he jammed his muzzle into his outer thigh._

I know you guys are partial to fish and shellfish, but the best I've got at the moment is some canned tuna and some chicken and rice soup. It's not much, but- _He shrugged._

It will be fine. Gratitude, _Siberius said, and inclined his head._

_You suspected that fine was hardly the word, but Siberius was too polite to say so when he was petting your dog in the middle of your living room. He would eat what he was given and keep his disappointment with your instant-meal hospitality to himself._

Great. _You rubbed your hands together._ Make yourselves comfortable, and I'll get that started. _You gestured to the elegant expanse of your living room, with its polished hardwood and its suite of sofa and loveseat and ottoman._

Kirill. _Nera eyed you in stony challenge, fingers smoothing Boomer's fur._

Yes. Kirill. I haven't forgotten. I'm just going to get your food started, okay? Your brother looks really hungry and tired.

_Her face softened._ Yes. They didn't feed us good food. No fish.

_A snort from Siberius suggested that the lack of proper nutrition for them was the least of their sadistic keepers' faults, and you'd worked for your stingy Uncle Sam long enough to know that they spared every expense to feed the men and women who laid their lives on the line for their country, let alone the off-the-books prisoners whose final resting place would be known only by the masked drone who dumped their bodies into the incinerator and scattered their ash to the soil of remote Virginia farmland. They're probably lucky they haven't spent the last five days shitting their brains out on a cold, stainless-steel toilet or puking hard enough to curl their toes while they blinked against the backsplash._

_Your stomach tightened in memory of dubious government-issue meals of lunches past._ I'm sorry about that, kiddo. We'll get you some nice fish tomorrow. And oysters, right?

_She nodded._ You remembered. _Pleased._

You really think I'd forget something so important?

_That earned you a wan smile._ Guess not.

That's right, _you averred stoutly._ Do your best with the tuna tonight, and we'll get all kinds of good fish tomorrow.

Okay.

Good girl.

_Siberius finished relaying your praise and brushed his fingers over his sister's lank hair. It was a mother's affection, and your throat tightened with the memory of your own doing the same thing thirty years ago, when she had been young and whole and seeing two small, dark heads where only one stood._

_All the talk brought Mike from the sanctuary of the master bedroom, where she'd retired with a glass of merlot and the book of the month. Her pink, silk robe was cinched tightly around her waist in order to conceal her figure from prying, unfamiliar eyes, and her thick, brown hair was still sleek and damp from her soak in the tub. Her bare feet kissed the hardwood with a chummy smack with every step as she came into the living room._

I thought I heard people in here, _she said, and cinched the belt more tightly around her waist. Her voice was light, and she flashed the gracious smile Mrs. McNally had gifted to both her daughters, but you saw the confusion in her eyes._

Look who's here, _you said with belated jauntiness._ I was just going to get them some tuna sandwiches and chicken and rice soup before I called Kirill with the good news.

_Siberius stepped toward her._ Apologies, Mistress Cooper, but we had nowhere to go, and we thought Kirill would be here. 

Well, he would be, but the idiot-

-went out looking for you, _you cut in before she could let the cat out of the bag about him being in the hospital._

_Siberius' eyes narrowed._ You said he was out trying to figure out how to get us back.

And he is. But that doesn't mean he wasn't looking for you, too. He's one hell of a multitasker.

_A skeptical grunt._

Listen, why don't you guys get cleaned up while we get the soup on? There's a tub in the bathroom down the hall on the right, or you can use the shower in the basement. Kirill's shampoo and stuff is still down there, I think.

_The prospect of a shower perked Siberius right up._ Have you the oils for our hair? _he asked hopefully._

I wish I did, _you answered, and felt like a prick when his momentary spark guttered and died, smothered by the weariness you could see in every line of his body._

_Michelle to the rescue._ I don't know exactly the oil you mean, but I've got a couple hot oil treatments if those would help.

Hot oil? _A flicker of hope._

Yeah. You let the little tube of oil sit in hot water for a few minutes, and then you apply it and let it soak in. I use them all the time. Come on, I'll show you, and if you think you can use it, I'll heat the water while you guys are getting clean.

Highest gratitude, _Siberius said. He pressed the side of his fist to his heart and bowed at the waist, the ageless courtesy of a Roman centurion, and when he straightened, he stood a little taller._

Follow me, and we'll get you set up. Don't you guys worry about a thing. We're going to take care of you, all right? _Michelle the mother, gathering her bedraggled brood with the quiet authority of long practice, and you could have kissed her._

_Siberius was too honorable and circumspect to claim so audacious a prize as a kiss, but as he followed her down the hall as meekly as a lamb, you had no doubt that he would happily join her pantheon of ardent admirers, and you couldn't suppress a surge of husbandly pride._

That's right, buddy. She's amazing. And she picked me, _you gloated, and fought the urge to perform a triumphant jig behind his back._ Their stuff should be in the basement, _you called as they disappeared, single-file, into the shadows of the hallway._ If their bags aren't at the bottom of the stairs in that space between the wall and the water heater, they should be behind the couch.

Okay. _Michelle's voice drifted from the depths of the hallway._

Oh, and if there's nothing good in there, I think some of my old sweats might work for him.

_An indistinct syllable greeted this magnanimous pronouncement, and you fancied that it carried a note of approval. You allowed yourself a furtive fistpump as you turned and swept your phone into your palm and thumbed through the short contact list to highlight Kirill's number._

Come on, asshole, pick up, _you muttered as you ambled into the kitchen with your phone tucked snugly between your shoulder and your ear. You hummed to yourself as you rooted through the cabinets to find the soup and the cans of tuna. The phone burred drowsily in your ear, a a jaded cicada too tired to muster the energy to give a fuck. Four rings, then five, and then it went to voicemail._

This is Orlov. Leave a message. 

With charm like that, how could anyone resist? _you fumed, and wrangled with the juvenile impulse to snap,_ Hey, cockhead, I found your family, so pull your head out of your ass and pick up. _Instead, you ended the call, dropped the phone into your hand, and used your other hand to yank open the cabinet. You searched by feel until you found the tuna, eyes fixed on the screen of your phone._

Prick, _you muttered as you slapped three cans onto the counter._

Easy on the granite, there Marine, _Michelle chided as she returned from her escort mission to the inner sanctum of Casa Cooper._

Sorry.

Let me guess, _she said as she joined you at the counter._ Your other half is being himself again.

_You snorted and turned to slip your arms around her and luxuriated in the cool skim of silk against your forearms._ First of all, _you murmured,_ you are my other half. _You congratulated yourself on your smoothness and bent to see if she found it worthy of a kiss. She did, soft and sweet and amused, and when it broke, you added,_ And yes. He's gone full Kirill.

_She gazed up at you, and the mischievous gleam in her eye made your heart skip a beat._ I'm your other half? 

Yeah... _you offered cautiously, and wracked your brain to figure out which careless word had landed you in this snare you could sense but not see._

Mmm. No, _she said solemnly, and shook her head._

No? _Bewildered now, and you could feel the husband points of which you had been so smugly assured slipping away._

No, _she echoed. She tapped you on the nose with her index finger._ I, _she informed you,_ am your _better_ half.

Ah.

And I want that entered into the official record.

Yes, counselor. _you pulled her close and helped yourself to another kiss._ I keep very thorough records, _you hummed against her lips._

_She purred._ See that you do. _She gave your ass a squeeze and stepped back._ As for your other half, _she said briskly, as though she weren't just playing grabass with her devoted husband,_ why are you surprised? He's thirty-nine going on twelve.

Ten, _you amended to yourself._ He's thirty-nine going on ten.

_But that wasn't a truth you could tell her. It was too raw, too close to the shadows and whispers that plagued even the best of your dreams, and so you said,_ Yeah, well, I guess I figured he'd want to keep in touch. You know, just in case I found some information.

He's pissed off. When has he ever acted reasonable when he's pissed off?

That's the thing, he usually goes cold when he's pissed off. Calculating. He'd have to to be a good asset. Assets who lose their shit don't last. _You thought of his file, thick as_ Les _goddamned_ Mis, _and blackened with redaction and the unvarnished chronicle of his service to men with neither names nor faces. This wasn't anger; this was something else, volatile and infinitely more fragile. Grief and fear and loss, all those weaknesses of mere mortals that he had never allowed himself to feel._

_Love, which he had never dared._

Speaking of, they okay? _You jerked your head in the direction of the bathroom, from which came the faint hiss of water through the pipes._

That depends on how you define okay. They're lucid and perfectly polite, but Siberius is operating on pure willpower, and it won't surprise me if he drops the minute he's fed. As for Nera, she hasn't made a peep.

I'm pretty sure she doesn't talk.

You know what I mean. Those little noises she makes. She hasn't made one. She just gives me the hairy eyeball and stays close to her brother.

_A dour huff._ Can you blame her? Her first contact with humans that aren't Kirill and his immediate family, and she's dragged off in the middle of the night to sleep on a cot that might as well be chipped from the concrete underneath it and eat government-issue bologna, which, trust me, is as nasty as it sounds. Can't imagine how fun that must be when you can't understand what they're saying or what they want you to do.

And it's all your fault, _your conscience supplied, the voice of your father, hard with malice and slurred with vodka, and you saw him as he'd been on that last day, already three sheets to the wind by early afternoon and working earnestly on raising a fourth, eyes glassy with booze and mouth a tight, ugly line inside a florid face._ Welcome to America, the land of opportunity. Let's get you started with a complimentary kick in the teeth. _He raised his tumbler in salute, lips curved into a sneer his younger son would one day perfect._

Hey, _Michelle said as though she could read the drift of your thoughts in the lines of your face, and she cradled it and drew the balls of her thumbs over your cheekbones, mindful of a right cheek still tender to the touch after your scrum with Kirill in that fetid hotbox of a hotel room._ Don't get tangled up in all the could'ves and should'ves. You did the right thing. You've got to know that.

I do, _you agreed._ But just because it's right doesn't mean it doesn't cause damage.

Maybe not, but nothing says we can't try to undo some of it now. _She patted your collarbone and dropped a kiss on your shoulder, and for the second time that night, you marveled that you'd ever gotten so lucky to make her think you were worth her while._ Which in this case means getting that oil heated and getting them fed. _She rose on her toes to give you a dainty peck, and then she stepped out of your orbit and whirled to the stove._

I got the cans of tuna. _You pointed unnecessarily to the counter._

Three cans? You think we need that much?

I'd give them more if we had it. You remember how much they put away at the cabin, and that was when they weren't starving.

Good point.

I was going to give them the chicken and rice soup, too, for something warm. You think they want relish and mayo in their tuna?

_She shooed you away._ I'll worry about the food. You worry about getting a hold of your brother. If they come out here and you have no news on Kirill, they might get squirrelly. 

You mean they might think I'm full of shit again, _you thought morosely._

_But you were a dutiful husband, and she was right. The sooner you could reach Kirill, the sooner you could get everybody calmed down and start doing damage control. You made a second call, but it joined the first in the purgatory of voicemail, so you swallowed a hearty fuck you and switched tacks by sending a text._

Maybe you could answer my calls if you bothered to pull your head out of your ass. I have your family. They're tired and scared and hungry, but otherwise OK. Asking for you.

_You expected the phone to ring before the case hit the counter, but it remained ominously silent, and the longer it stayed that way, the more you worried. Visions danced in your head of Kirill, in thrall to his grief and figuring he had no country and nothing left to lose, blazing a trail of bodies from the hospital to Quantico and going down in a hail of bullets outside the director's office. Hapless candy stripers with snapped necks and nurses with throats laid open with a scalpel or the edge of his dinner tray. The doctor strangled with his own stethoscope, and the rent-a-cops on the down side of their careers, sprawled in the entrance to the ER with a bullet from their own twenty-twos in their left eyes and their brains pulped inside their cooling skulls._

_When the call still hadn't come by the time Siberius and Nera were seated at your dinner table with their freshly-oiled hair tucked beneath shower caps, inhaling tuna sandwiches and soup with a single-minded urgency that bordered on mania, it was all you could do not to pace the floor and drop oaths like a trail of breadcrumbs as you went. Your fervid imaginings had progressed to Kirill holding the CIA director hostage in his swank home on the Tidewater, cold-eyed and remorseless as he tied the paunchy bastard into an antique chair and aimed the muzzle of his Sig Sauer at his shriveled dick. Kirill, expressionless as he pistol-whipped the blubbering director in front of his equally-trussed, sobbing wife. Kirill, matter-of-factly threatening to jam his gun up her cunt and pull the trigger. You thought--hoped--such black poisons had been bled from him by his time in the good old US of A, but with a silent phone and a head full of violence and vengeance, you knew better. Kirill might've laid down his arms, but he would always know how to use them, and no matter how civilized you and Michelle tried to make him, he would always have that itch beneath the skin._

_You had just begun to imagine the wall-to-wall news coverage of the ongoing crisis as the news vans converged at the director's house like vultures when your doomsday scenario was interrupted by the shriek of tires on blacktop._

They've come back, _you thought, and registered the lack of weapon at your hip._ Someone countermanded the release order, or they found something in the bloodwork that marks them as a danger to humanity. Maybe they carry a virus that'll have us all dead in forty-eight hours, or that can be used as a bioweapon. Either way, they're coming in, and I might as well be naked.

_From the corner of your eye, you saw Siberius turn his soup spoon around in his hand and rise from his chair as silently and fluidly as smoke. He'd had the same thought, and he had no intention of going down without a fight. Beside him, Nera stilled, spoonful of soup halfway to her mouth. Her gaze darted between you and her brother, and her nostrils flared._

Maybe it's the media, _you thought with lunatic cheer as footsteps pounded up your front steps, solid and thick-soled._ Come to ask what you think about your twin brother, the former Russian agent, going apeshit and blowing out the brains of the CIA director and his wife. Maybe you can make the rounds of all the big news shows before you finish your career as a security guard at a moldering skate park and family-fun center in Terre Haute.

_A thunderous volley of knocks rattled the door in its frame, and then a voice, fraught and demanding._ Open the fucking door. _Kirill._

_You released a long breath sour with adrenaline, and Siberius relaxed on the periphery of your vision. He kept his feet but set the spoon on his plate, careful not to drip soup onto the glossy, varnished wood._

_Your hand moved to holster a gun you weren't carrying, and you shuffled toward the door._ If you break my door and wake up my kids, I'm gonna kick your ass, _you called wearily, and the pounding stopped, though you could hear the impatient scrape of rubber on brick as you drew nearer._

_You drew back the curtain and peered onto the stoop to confirm the ID, and sure enough, there was Kirill, sidling from foot to foot on the top step, fist upraised to deliver another fusillade to your besieged door._

Hey, _you barked._ Cut that shit out. You trying to wake the whole damn neighborhood?

_He lowered his fist with a scowl, but never stopped his furious sidle. You let the curtain fall back into place and went to the door. You unlocked the deadbolt and slid back the chain, and before you could turn the knob yourself, Kirill was pushing himself inside, craning to look over your shoulder._ Where are they, Viko? Give them to me.

Jesus Christ, would you relax? They're fine. What the hell are you even doing her anyway? You weren't supposed to be released until tomorrow afternoon?

_It was all so much useless fraternal quacking to Kirill, who shouldered past you without so much as a passing glance. You opened your mouth to remonstrate with him and ask who the fuck he thought he was, barging in here like this, but the words died in your throat when you saw his face. No hauteur, no sneering bravado, no smug swagger, only naked relief so raw that to gawk at it struck you as indecent. You swallowed around a sudden lump in your throat and quashed the impulse to close the distance between you and enfold him an embrace._

See? They're good. They're okay.

Did they hurt them? _he asked in a voice so small that your eyes burned. No Russian assassin now, just your little brother, lost and beseeching and ashamed._

_It was Siberius who answered. He hurried from the table and did what what misguided pride forbade you, closed the distance between them and gathered him close._

We are all right now, _ma atet nin, he murmured against the side of his neck._

That doesn't answer my question, _he countered peevishly, but he clung to Siberius with mulish ferocity._

I know, _Siberius answered serenely, and it was an answer unto itself, a truth never spoken but declared nonetheless. There were more words, but these you did not understand, and Siberius' hand caressed Kirill's nape with an unashamed intimacy that warmed your own. You thought of Kirill's hand on Siberius' cheek, and of Siberius' hips rolling in the predawn light. It was a voyeur's thought, prying and unworthy, and you turned your head to study Nera a she stared at the back of her brother's head, her soup cooling on her spoon._

'Least I'm not the only looky lou. _It was cold comfort._

What are you wearing? _Kirill, mystified, and when you returned your attention to him, you realized he had stepped back and was eyeing Siberius' shower cap with speculative bewilderment._

_Siberius blinked blankly at him for a few seconds, and then his expression cleared and he skimmed his fingers over the cheap plastic._ Ah. Mistress Cooper was kind enough to offer Nera and me oil for our hair. She insists that we wear these to assist in absorption.

_Kirill's shoulders sagged._ Good. _It wasn't until you heard the brittle relief in his voice that you realized he'd been waiting for something far worse, for Siberius to pull off the cap and reveal a shorn scalp._

_Siberius cradled your brother's face in his hands._ We are well, _ma atet nin._ Very tired, and very hungry, but we are well. That is all that matters now. Please come eat with us. You look like you haven't eaten in days.

He probably hasn't. _You thought of his hospital-approved lunch sailing across the room and splattering on the floor._

You need it more than I do, _he said gruffly, but he didn't protest when Siberius led him to the table, and Michelle, who had been watching their reunion with wet eyes, quietly went to the refrigerator in search of more sandwich fixings._

_Kirill slid into the chair across from Nera, who finally took her long-delayed bite of soup and eyed him with longing and bruised suspicion. Kirill's shoulders slumped, and he tucked into himself as if in anticipation of a blow. He raised his hands and began to sign, and you would've given anything for Siberius to interpret as he so often did, but he remained silent and returned to his abandoned sandwich with quiet relish._

_Nera watched the jerky arc of Kirill's hands intently, a cat watching the frightened twitchings of a wounded mouse, and her own hands rose in response, fluid yet sharp, and even you knew it was a rebuke._

I know, _he replied aloud, and ran his fingers through his hair. His fingers fluttered again, and then he lowered his gaze and stared fixedly at the table._

_It was such an odd posture for your brother that worry fluttered in your belly, but Siberius was unruffled, and a small smile bloomed in the corners of his mouth as he took a prodigious bite of his tuna sandwich._

_Nera studied him over several contemplative slurps of soup, and then she set down her spoon and heaved a world-weary sigh from the depths of her small, curling toes, Atlas groaning beneath his eternal burden, and slipped from her chair. She padded around the table, skinny legs a flash of baseboard-white beneath the t-shirt Michelle had donated to her wardrobe. Kirill tracked her movement, wary and wistful and possessed of a forlorn hope, and you could cheerfully have put a bullet in the brains of your father and every other waste of skin and God's grace that had told him that kindness and love could only be earned by the worthy, by the sacrifice of blood and bone and human connection._

_He turned in his seat, and his hands fashioned a halting message that was met with a consolatory hoot. A click of her tongue as though to say,_ you sad, ridiculous man, _and then she shook her head and clambered onto his lap. She slipped her skinny arms around his neck and patted his back, benevolent matron granting absolution to an abashed charge, and Kirill uttered a strangled huff and buried his face in her shower cap._

_Spasibo malen'kaya ptichka, he murmured into the crackling plastic, and as he sat back in his chair and tucked her against him, you understood. There was no artifice in him now, no reflexive melodrama meant to drive outsiders to error-riddled distraction and make you question your relationship despite your identical DNA. When he called Siberius and Nera his family, it was the God's-honest truth, or as close to it as an atheist's heart could come. These were his people, plucked from the dust of a barren asteroid and offered a place in his heart, as precious to him as Michelle and your babies are to you._

_Nera shifted and squirmed until she was settled on his lap with her back pressed to his chest, and Kirill chuckled and smoothed her shower cap._

You should eat, _he admonished the back of her head._

_Nera burred drowsily, and though you were quite sure she was deaf, had seen evidence of it with your own eyes, she stretched across the table and pulled her plate and bowl toward herself._

You sure she's not psychic?

No, _Kirill answered flatly._ So I'm you're chair now? _Kirill groused, but his eyes were soft, and he made no effort to dislodge her._

The most fearsome assassin in Russian special ops, tamed by a little girl, _you teased, and Kirill shot you a lazy bird._

Love is the sweetest weakness, or so my father said, _Siberius offered, and his gaze lingered on Kirill's cheek._

Yeah, it is, _you agreed to yourself._ And you've got it bad, don't you?

_You looked at Mike as she stood at the counter, assembling Kirill's sandwich in her bathrobe, her hair a soft, dark fall over her shoulders. She moved with a grace and assurance that made your heart swell with awe and pride, and you wondered what the hell you would do without her._

You almost found out, didn't you? If Frank Moses had been a lesser man, if he'd been Cynthia, with her ruthlessness and ambition, or if he'd been Dunning, with his arrogance and unashamed amorality, you would've come home to the end of all good things. You would've burst through the door with your gun so much desperate bravado in your hand and your heart a triphammering throb in your throat and found this house cold and abandoned, a temple with it goddess overthrown, so much meaningless marble shattered on the floor. 

If it hadn't been Frank Moses, you might've come home to bodies in the yard with snapped necks or bullet holes in the center of their foreheads, their eyes wide and unseeing as they lay beneath the storybook sky. Or maybe he would've left them in the house, trussed up in chairs in the living room like a modernist sculpture of twisted lips and frozen terror, blood still oozing from their noses and their mouths clenched so tightly around their gags that their teeth cracked and rendered all your dentist's meticulous work for naught. Or maybe they would've been strung from the cathedral ceilings of which the realtor made so much when you were starry-eyed newlyweds with the McNally money to burn, slack and black-tongued as their extension-cord nooses creaked and groaned against the beams over which they'd been slung. You've left calling cards like that for more than a few unlucky souls, as I recall, husbands to be found by unsuspecting wives with arms full of groceries and squirming toddlers and sons and daughters to be found by little brothers and sisters who will live with those memories for the rest of their lives. The lucky ones will get a lifetime of therapy; the rest of them will learn to get by with booze or pills and will always wonder what bogeyman visited their unremarkable lives. They'll live with the images and the nightmares, just like you live with the memory of the cold terror in your belly as you smashed the pedal of your Expedition to the floor and prayed to a God whom you seldom bothered to notice, but who now possessed a terrible, swooning clarity.

_I will rip everything you love out of your life._ The voice of God coming down the line, as remote and dispassionate as the firmament, and there are still nights you wake up with it in your ears and your heart squeezing painfully inside your chest, your throat dry as sandpaper. You blink against the night and search for the reassuring hump of Mike beneath the covers, and then you get up and check on the kids because you can't shake the cold certainty that Cynthia or Dunning had gotten the last laugh after all, that they'd tripped a killswitch and sent someone to come in the night like a killing frost and tie up loose ends. All your sins come home to roost, but it was your family who paid the wages.

_You recoiled from that road. It was too dark, and you were too tired, and Christ only knew what fuckery you'd have to clean up in the morning. You stifled a groan and rubbed eyes that suddenly felt too big for your head and wished like hell that you could have a shot or three without worrying Mike, who advanced with Kirill's sandwich and a glass of water._

You all right? _she mouthed, her eyes dark with a concern she shouldn't have to carry, and you smothered a wave of guilt with a grunt and a flap of your hand._

'M good. Just tired. We'll get everybody bedded down soon, and I'll see if I have any messes to clean up. _Do_ I have any messes to clean up? _you asked Kirill with sudden, wary shrewdness. You braced yourself for a show of guileless innocence, all wide eyes and Orphan Annie earnestness, but he surprised you._

I stole the doctor's car.

Of course you did, _you muttered wryly, and wondered if Michelle would mind if you forewent the shots and chugged straight from the bottle._

He was an asshole. _Truculent, and he smoothed his hand over Nera's shower cap as she paused in her inhalation of the last of her soup to eye his sandwich with bleary curiosity._

He was saving you from yourself, _you pointed out, and each word felt like a thousand pounds._ No one told you to punch the medicine cabinet and let your hand get infected.

_Kirill ignored you with the dogged stolidity of a Russian peasant woman stumping through waist-deep snow, but Siberius let his gaze drop to the hand in question, and his brow furrowed. Not with anger, as you expected, or irritation at Kirill's reckless, destructive impulsivity and blind, gnashing anger, but mournful comprehension and quiet solicitude._

I see you eyeing my sandwich, _Kirill told Nera, gruff as an old goat, but he let her pull his plate towards herself and peer at his sandwich._ What's got your attention? _he asked when she gave it a prod with her finger._

_This Siberius translated._

Home bread, _was Nera's reply._

_Neither you nor Kirill understood, but Siberius smiled softly._ Yes, I suppose it is. It's the texture, I think, _he explained._ It's much coarser than the soft, sweet mush you Terrans favor. It looks like what our mother made.

It's multigrain, _Mike offered, and it was dollars to doughnuts that there'd be a loaf of the stuff after her next grocery trip, probably two._ I'm sorry. If I'd known you preferred it, I would've used that instead.

_Siberius shook his head._ There is no need for apology. You have been kind beyond all reason or expectation. _He touched his hand to his opposite shoulder and inclined his head, and with that small gesture of gratitude, you figured you might just be friends someday, a suspicion bolstered by Mike's obvious pleasure at the acknowledgement. There was a spring in her step as she retreated to the kitchen island and slipped onto a stool._

I suppose you want a bite? _Kirill asked Nera, and pantomimed biting into a sandwich._

_Nera scooped up the sandwich with an exultant chortle, but her bite was small, almost dainty, and she set the sandwich down with persnickety care._

Well? _Siberius translated the word into movement._

_The answer was a high, sharp trill, and her hands rose and fell and whorled in reply._

It's very yummy. It has spicy sauce and those yummy red, juicy things. _Siberius' brow furrowed as he considered the words he'd spoken._ Spicy sauce?

_Kirill lifted the top of his sandwich._ I think she means spicy mustard. And tomatoes.

_Siberius' expression cleared._ Of course. Forgive me, _ma atet nin,_ I am tired. She does like tomatoes, especially with a little balsamic.

We'll get her some tomorrow. We will get many things tomorrow. _The thick monotone of the exhausted captive, and he sagged in his chair, one arm looped around Nera's middle._

He's wiped, _you realized, and your body ached in sympathy._ Why don't you go to bed, honey? _you suggested to Mike._ I'll clean up in here and get them settled, and then I'll be in. Right after I get rid of the doctor's car, _you thought, and tried not to cry like a toddler at the prospect of ditching and burning a fully-loaded BMW in the middle of nowhere while your fellow suburbanites curled warm and snug in front of the stupefying glow of the eleven-o'clock news._

You sure? _Mike asked, uncertain yet eager, and she slipped from her stool and shuffled to hover at your side._

Yeah. You've got to get the kids up for school in the morning, and there's no point in you staying up for some dishes.

Okay. _Relieved yet ashamed of the desertion of her post, and she clutched the neck of her robe and bent to kiss your temple._ Don't be long, _she murmured, and the warmth of her lips made you shiver._

I won't. _You closed your eyes and drew the scent of her into your nostrils, and when you opened them again, it was to her soft, sleepy smile. You reached up to cup the side of her neck, and the flutter of her pulse against your palm was a fleeting brush with the divine._

You hold that thought, Marine, _she whispered._ Give me a raincheck until tomorrow, and I'll rock your world.

Mmm. That a promise? 

There ever been a promise I haven't kept, Cooper? _She turned her head and dipped her head to kiss the top of your hand, and then she straightened and offered the motley assemblage at her table a soft goodnight. Siberius made to rise in acknowledgment, but Kirill rested a restraining hand on his arm, and he settled for a nod instead._

_You took a moment to admire her departure as she shuffled to the beckoning coziness of your bedroom, and Kirill, tired as he was, smirked at you over the remnants of his sandwich._

What? _you growled as though you didn't know, and he merely shook his head and popped the last of his sandwich into his mouth and dusted his hands together._

_There wasn't a lot of talk after that. Nera was nearly out in her bowl by the time Kirill called an end to dinner, and Siberius was only upright and moving at the behest of grim survival instinct and sheer bull-headedness. They made a sorrowful, staggering conga line as they lurched and listed down the hall, a ragtag string of lost souls groping their way along the carefully plastered and tastefully decorated path of well-appointed suburbia. You watched them until they veered into the bathroom for their last communion with the porcelain god, and then you set about cleaning up the kitchen and making another sandwich for Kiriil, whom you suspected was still starving. He might've been lean and lithe as a barzoi, but he had the appetite of a mastiff, and odds were better than good that he'd been so fixated on his bedraggled brood that he'd ignored the worst of his hunger. Why not when he'd been trained to believe himself expendable so long as his objectives were met?_

_You waited until you heard them thumping down the stairs into the basement, and then you followed suit with a beer and a plate loaded with another sandwich with the works, some pitted olives, cheese cubes, and a few slices of summer sausage. They were in the living room, blinking molishly at the soft yellow light and the still-unpatched holes in the walls._

You did this, _ma atet nin? Siberius asked quietly, a sleepy slur that made you want to sink onto the nearest horizontal surface in drowsy sympathy. He peered at the ragged pocks in logy bewilderment._

Never mind, _came the brusque retort._ You are not carpenter. Or an interior designer. Let's just go to bed.

_Siberius swayed on his feet and surveyed him with bemusement._ No, but my uncles were. Carpenters. They were excellent, _he managed at last._

Please. _Unspeakable tenderness from a lips accustomed to hard words and sneering taunts, and while part of you wanted to turn from it, to grant him the sweet privacy you had enjoyed in your fumbling, besotted courtship of Michelle, this was a side of him that you had but dimly suspected and feared lost to years of brutal training and hardscrabble existence in flophouses and seedy brothels, and you couldn't bring yourself to be so noble._

_Siberius gazed at him in benevolent consternation._ All right, _ma atet nin. He squeezed Kirill's shoulder and turned toward the bedroom._

_Nera made to follow him, but she spotted you and altered course with a wide lurch, a diminutive socialite on an elegant bender. She offered you a sleepy smile and wrapped her arms around your hips in a loose hug._

Hey, kiddo. _Surprised and uncertain, and you shifted from foot to foot._

_Oblivious to your discomfiture, she looked up at you, bony chin pressed into your belly like a piton, and uttered a soft hoot._

I believe that's a thank you. _Siberius, lead-tongued and heavy-lidded, one foot poised on bare, white toes._

You're welcome, sweetheart. There's nothing to worry about now, okay? You're safe. You just get some sleep, and we'll figure stuff out in the morning.

_No translation was forthcoming from Siberius, who was fading by the second, and so she watched your lips in polite bemusement. When telepathy failed to transmit your meaning or your good intentions, she emitted a rueful burr, gave the base of his spine a comforting pat, and retreated to the safety of her brother's shadow._

I won't be long, _Kirill told them as they straggled to the bedroom. When the door closed behind them, Kirill turned to you._ You can unclench around Nera. She's not contagious.

What? No! I was just surprised. That's more Tatiana's thing.

Well, get used to it. She takes affection anywhere she can find it.

You sure that's a good thing? _Visions of pedophiles and traffickers danced in your head, and you thought of Nera, stuffed into the back of a cargo van with zip ties on her wrists and ankles and a dirty socked crammed into her mouth, a preview of the even filthier things she'd have to accept into it if she wanted to earn her keep for a daddy she never wanted and from whom she would likely never escape._

_Kirill's lip curled in disgust._ With strangers? No. But she does not consider you such when you wear my face.

Technically, you're wearing my face, _you pointed out, ever jealous of the twelve minutes that separated you._

_A half-hearted smirk._ Not to her. With Nera, it's first seen, first credited. _He eyed the plate and beer in your hands._ What the fuck's that for?

_You raised both._ Thought you might want a little more. I know that single sandwich didn't cut it. Especially not after four days of shitty hospital food, most of which probably ended up in the trash. 

Surprisingly little, actually, _he said with unbecoming smugness._ Most of it ended up on the walls and floor.

That's not funny, _you lectured, and God, why did it sound like you were having a heart-to-heart with your six-year-old?_ Tomorrow, you're going back to the hospital to finish your treatment, and you're going to apologize to those nurses and candy stripers. They don't get paid enough to put up with your shit.

_Kirill's sly triumph curdled to sour petulance._ I didn't see you rushing to eat it. And you know I can't go back. I stole the asshole doctor's car, remember? I go back there, and I'll end up on the next plane to Moscow.

You're too valuable to the agency for that, _you muttered, but the possibility, remote though it was, made your stomach roll. If he got deported, he'd be dead three steps off the tarmac in good old Mother Russia._ At the very least, you're sending those people flowers. And not cheap ones, either.

_Kirill raised his palms in surrender._ Only the best, _he promised, and rested his palm over his heart, the very soul of meekness._ Maybe, _he mused,_ if I get the roses, the redhead with the perky tits will give me her number.

Kirill! _you hissed, scandalized, and cast an anxious glance at the closed bedroom door._

What? _Eyebrows raised in guileless inquiry._

Just...stop being an amoral dickhead and eat, _you answered wearily._ Or don't. Either way, I've got to clean up your mess.

_It's not my mess, _he countered, and swiped the proffered refreshments from your hands._ I never asked them to steal my fucking family._

_The redhead with the perky tits part of your family, too?_ you retorted snidely.

Fuck you, _he said around a yawn, and shuffled to the basement stairs, where he plopped onto the bottom riser and balanced the plate precariously on the peaks of his knees._

We have a perfectly good couch-aw, fuck it, _you grumbled, and joined him on his low perch._

_He set his unopened beer on the floor beside his feet and picked up his sandwich._ I thought you had to clean up my mess. _He took a prodigious bite of his sandwich and chewed with the quick, wary precision of a weasel feasting on henhouse eggs._

_You shrugged and rescued an olive from the precipice of his plate, an act of altruism that earned you an indignant glower._ I do. _You made no move to rise, and after a few chews, he snorted and left you to your idiocy._

_He didn't speak again until he opened his beer. He tossed the cap aside and took a long pull._ They hurt them. _So soft it was little more than an intimation, but the guilt was the clarion peal of a bell._ I'm not sure how badly; Siberius seems a little hazy, like he's been drugged, and Nera just wants to go to sleep with a blanket. Blankets are nice, _he finished apropos of nothing, and took another pull of beer._

They're not the only ones they've hurt, _you thought dismally as you watched his gaze dart to the closed bedroom door again._

It might not've been a deliberate drugging, _you offered._ They might've just given him a sedative without considering that it might affect his system differently. _Cold comfort, but it was the best you could offer._

_A dubious hum._ That doesn't explain the bruises all over him.

He got more than what I saw?

Yes. _So taut it made your chest throb. He shifted on the step, careful to hold his plate in place._ Do you think they know that he isn't human?

If they don't, they will, _you answered, and he nodded as though that were the answer he expected and slumped even further into the step._

Hey, _you admonished gently, and rested your palm against his nape. He stiffened but didn't shrug it off._ Hey, get out of your own head, _bratishka._ What matters now is that they're safe, and I'm going to help you keep them that way.

_He eyed you, torn between a little brother's faith and the hard pragmatism that had kept him alive when he'd had nothing left to lose._

If they're your family, then that makes them my family, too, and nobody fucks with my family.

_He went soft as tallow beneath your hand, and you longed to pull him into a hug, but Kirill allowed himself such naked vulnerability only rarely, and if you pushed for too much, ditching a stolen BMW might be the least of your worries tonight, and so you settled for a squeeze of his nape and a tap of your shoulder against his._

So stop worrying and finish your food like a civilized human being. Do you need anything? Did Nera find her bear?

_He paused in mid-chew._ Sibearius? _He shook his head._

Sibearius?

Don't ask me.

Huh. It should've been right on top. 

It wasn't. Just clothes.

I can't fig- _You stopped._ Of course she did. I told her he wasn't hers to play with.

Since when has that ever stopped her? She's a McNally. She's used to getting whatever she wants.

_You scowled at this latest gibe at your family, but he was too volatile and the hour was growing ever later, and so you simply said,_ I'll check her room. Anything else?

_He shook his head._

_He looked so lost and ravaged that pity overwhelmed your fatherly pique._ You know you can stay here as long as you need, until you find a good place for them.

_He studied his cheese, the small, yellow cubes heaped like the bricks of a toppled pyramid._ Thank you. _Then, pained,_ I'm sorry, Viko. I did not mean for any of this. _He shrugged and jerked his head in the direction of the parallel wall and its collection of ragged holes. He raised his eyes, shamefaced and drawn and beseeching._

_You raised your hand from his nape and cupped the back of his head, much as you had when he'd burrowed into you like a frightened child and sobbed until he retched, and never mind his macho inhibitions._

Not just his, _muttered a voice that sounded suspiciously like Mike._

It's all right, Yusha. You can come in from the cold now. You done good. You all did.

_The faintest of smiles, and your brother, who swore to the world that he needed no one but himself and had neither time nor interest in sweetness or affection, sat with the back of his head pressed to your palm, a cat arching into an idle caress. You were on thirty-Mississippi when he finally ducked away under the pretense of helping himself to a cheese cube._

I'm gonna take care of the car. I'll let you know when I find the bear.

_You left him then to his midnight meal and his family, and there they stayed for nearly a year, until they bought the gorgeous, redbrick Colonial pile next door and made it their own, a showpiece that nevertheless carries within its stately, dignified walls the coziness of home. You worried that such constant closeness would lead to petty squabbles and the fraying of their bond, but that basement might as well have been a palace to Siberius and Nera, and they made it lovelier before they left. Siberius repaired the walls and refinished the floors, a chip off the old familial block when it came to carpentry, and Nera painted a mural that took your breath away. They've been gone six months, and you can't bring yourself to change anything but the sheets because it feels so much like a home unto itself._

_About the only thing you don't miss is the not-so-muffled sounds of vigorous and immensely-satisfying sex that drifted to your flushing ears most nights._

_And you're not so sure you don't miss it,_ hisses his mutinous libido, sibilant and seductive as the serpent draped languidly over the branch of an apple tree. _Listening to the two of them going at it never failed to get you harder than granite and Mike wet and hungry for anything to scratch that filthy little itch, and you had some of the best sex of your life that year, uninhibited and feral and dark on your tongue as a mouthful of blackstrap molasses. Sometimes you wish you could think of a reason to have them stay over just so you can give yourself over to that forbidden ache so low and delicious in your belly and between your legs, smoke from a fire you can't quite see but whose heat you feel all the same._

"-ing word I've said?" The words cleave through his shameful reverie with the cool, stinging immediacy of a blade sunk between his ribs.

"Uh?" he grunts inelegantly, and rests his beer bottle between his legs in hopes of putting a damper on his burgeoning hardon.

"I said, 'Have you even heard a word I'm saying?'" Shrill and pissy, and Kirill glares at him like an indignant meerkat from his perch on the edge of the sofa, brows drawn together and lips a thin, pinched line. "Or are you too busy having a wet dream about your new administrative assistant?"

He fights the impulse to wince at just how close he is to the truth and releases a soft, beery belch to hide his embarrassment. "I'm sorry; I thought you were busy making like the Sphinx over there," he says airily, and tries not to think of Kirill's voice, breathless and guttural and helpless before the onslaught of Siberius' wicked mouth, or of Mike's cunt, slick and eager around his pistoning cock.

"Well, if you'd bother to remove your brain from your cock for a moment, you'd know I just told you that Siberius has asked me to marry him." Peevish and imperious, and Kirill's scowl deepens. 

"Hey! About fucking time. Congratulations, man." He raises his beer in salute, libidinous thoughts forgotten. So you having a spring wedding?"

Kirill's only response is to shift on the sofa and study the floor just beyond the rounded toe of his sneaker, and unease flutters in his belly.

_Oh,_ bratishka, _don't tell me you went and did something stupid, like say no, or panic and break up with him._

_If he did, this might be a spiral you can't pull him out of,_ says a voice that sounds alarmingly like Pamela Lundy, cool and clinical in its analytical detachment. _A stolen car and a trashed room in some fleapit motel will be the least of your worries. You'll be lucky if the agency doesn't have to spend the next five years and half a billion dollars cleaning up the fallout from his broken heart._

"I did not tell him yes," Kirill says at last, a toddler grudgingly confessing that it's not Chanel wafting from the snug confines of his training pants. His gaze is still fixed on the floor, though it might have shifted to the grimy crease of his Reebok.

"You told him no?" he exclaims, and sits forward on the couch, the last swallow of his beer sloshing against the confines of the bottle as it dangles between his knees above the gleaming oak hardwood of his living-room floor.

Kirill's head snaps up, and his eyes flash. His lips pull back from his teeth, a dog recoiling from an upraised hand. "I didn't tell him no. I told him I needed to think about it." The last words are a sullen mutter, and he subsides into the cushions.

Ah. "How did he take it?"

Another shift on the couch, and Kirill's fingers tighten around his empty beer bottle. "He said he understood," he informs the floor in front of his toes.

_But you're not sure he does,_ William thinks as he watches him raise his empty beer bottle halfway to his lips, lower it again, and turn it slowly in his hand. _You know how much that must've hurt him, what it would've done to you if the roles had been reversed, and you're scared shitless that you've fucked everything up because you got cold feet and couldn't bring yourself to accept what you wanted most. You're afraid that you're going to go home to a house empty of everything that made it worth having, or worse, that he'll still be there, but pinched and silent and wounded, already untethering from the life he thinks you don't want together._

"What's there to think about?" he ventures. "Fuck, you guys are practically made for and definitely crazy about each other. Or did I imagine coming home to find you two fucking in the middle of the living room?

"You're welcome," Kirill says impishly.

"Welcome, my ass. I'm never going to get those images out of my head," he grumbles, and stoutly ignores the smoky coil low in his belly.

Kirill's momentary amusement fades into dour, wretched misery, and this time, he's quiet for so long that he wonders if he should break out the vodka and its numbing fire in a bid to ease his pain and thereby loosen his tongue. He's tensing his calves in order to raise his ass from the seat and beat feet to the liquor cabinet when Kirill finds his voice.

"It's too much of a risk." The anguished whisper of a penitent in the confessional, a burden passed from his lips to God's ear. 

_You're afraid you'll lose them,_ he realizes, and his heart aches in sympathy. _That all your sins will wash them away and leave only the agony of their absence. You'll come home from work one day and find Siberius dead in the hallway, their well-laid plains to make it look like a tidy murder-suicide thwarted by his refusal to die quietly. Maybe his head will be bashed in, his ribs crushed; maybe he'll be all but gutted because he put up such a goddamn fight to survive and give Nera as much time as he could to escape._

_And Nera? Maybe you find her facedown in the toilet, a kitten cruelly disposed of, long brown hair clinging to the porcelain like the slenderest of river reeds, fingers slack and wet and turning blue as they curl on the cold tile like dead spiders. Or maybe she's in her bedroom, smothered beneath her cherished blankets so cozy and warm. Or her art studio, crumpled amid her paint pots and solvents and brushes still tinted with her final strokes. Or maybe she'll make it as far ass the yard, a girl eight rising rapidly toward twenty, a sad heap in the backyard, the silk ribbons so often in her hair wrapped around her mottled, swollen throat like a festive Christmas noose._

_Or maybe you never find her at all. Maybe she's as gone as her brother even if there's no body stiffening to cold marble in a pool of blood in the ruins of your living room. You put Siberius in the ground in the best casket money can buy or cremate him and carry a pinch of his ashes in a locket around your neck so he'll be forever close, and then you spend the rest of your life looking for his baby sister and knowing you'll never find her. You'll never stop looking, stop hoping, stop yearning, but the people who carry your chips are powerful and pitiless, and you know the only way you'll find her is if they let you just to watch you earn the full measure of their retribution and lose what's left of your mind. You'll try to fill the gaping holes they leave behind with anonymous pussy and vodka, but you'll never be able to erase the image of Siberius lifeless and defiled on the floor of the first house you ever called a home or stop worrying that Nera was still out there, sucking and fucking her way through Eastern Europe and the short, miserable years of a life that was never fair._

It's a terror he understands too well, one that has skulked on the periphery of his well-ordered life since he'd admitted to himself that he wasn't just looking at the rings in the jeweler's case at Solovey's, and that has only deepened with time and the births of Andrew and Tatiana.

_I will rip everything you love out of your life._ Mercy had found him then, gruff and bald and possessed of a sense of honor that he shared but had too often compromised in the name of country, but there have been many nights since, when he's lain in his bed or on the filthy slab of his cot during his captivity, that a still, small voice has whispered that such lenity will not come again.

"I know what you're up to," he says. "You think that if you push them away, maybe even cut them loose, you'll keep them safe, and nobody'll get hurt. It won't work."

"How do you know?" he snarls. "You trying to tell me you tried to dump Michelle for her own good?"

William snorts. "Are you fucking kidding? Mike would've skinned my balls and used the scrotes as a coin purse if I'd tried that patronizing bullshit. Plus, it's a long-established fact that I'm smarter than you."

A derisive snort. "Only Americans confuse dumb luck with intelligence," he sniffs, and shifts on the edge of the couch like a disdainful cockatoo.

William ignores his gibe. "Point is, I know what you're thinking, and trust me, you're an idiot."

Kirill scowls, and William can practically _see_ see the feathered crest rising, priapic and indignant. "And you're an asshole," he retorts. "And how do you know it won't? Maybe it's the best thing for everyone involved. I am not good husband material." 

"Just because I wasn't dumbass enough to do it doesn't mean I didn't think about it. And Siberius knew you weren't good husband material when he started, unless you think he's an utter moron, and he still picked you anyway."

"I am a rather accomplished lover," Kirill offers smugly, a plump-breasted cock strutting along his walk.

"Not that accomplished, trust me," William mutters.

The affronted cockatoo returns. "What have you heard?" Kirill straightens, ready, no doubt, to defend his sexual honor. 

_More than I'm ever going to tell you,_ he thinks, and quashes the memory of Kirill's groans of ecstasy drifting from the basement.

When he makes no immediate reply, Kirill sinks into the cushion with an indistinct oath and glowers at him in brooding, mutinous silence. "How do you know it will not work?" he asks eventually.

"Because it won't, he says simply, and shrugs. "Even if you could cut them could and hurt Siberius and Nera so badly that they wouldn't piss on you if you were on fire, let alone follow you into it, do you really think you could just go back to boozing and whoring your way through life until your heart gives out, that you'd never give them a thought and wish they were here, wish so hard that you want to throw up?"

Kirill's silence is an answer unto itself, and he watches as he picks at the fabric of his rumpled cargo pants and lets his gaze roam over the scented candles in tastefully-tarnished holders and the walnut shelves that flank the home entertainment center, filled with too many DVDs and Blu-rays that they never get around to watching and the video game that Andrew would play the grooves off of if Mike didn't limit his screen time. It lingers over the family photos in their handsome black and silver frames and the shadow boxes that feature mementos from the wedding--invitations and favors and even a linen napkin that Mike's sister, Kate, had filched from her table in a bit of drunken craftiness. Pictures of the kids in various stages of pig-tailed and snaggle-toothed splendor.

"How do you do this? How do you live with it?" 

"I wanted a life with Mike. I loved her. The thought of losing her and always wondering what might've been if I hadn't been too scared to take that leap was more than I could stand. Yeah, I could've said no and let her find some guy with a boring job and solid stock portfolio, and maybe I should have, but if I had, I wouldn't have this. I'd have a shitty rental I barely slept in and nothing to come home to once Uncle Sam gave me a kick in the ass and sent me on down the road. That's cold fucking comfort when you're fifty years old and balding and the only thing you got from the gratitude of your country was a stress ulcer and the promise of a heart attack. If I don't have them, then what the hell am I even doing this for?"

"But what if?" Kirill cries, stricken, and his eyes are wide and wild inside his blanched face. "What if something happens-"

"Then I spend the rest of my life running them down and putting a bullet in the heads of the sons of bitches who did it, and I save one for myself." Cordite and steel, and a muscle in his jaw twitches. He thinks of Tati, the unbridled, whirlwind force of her as she'd barreled across the clearing in front of the cabin in Alaska, her dark hair flying behind her as she came, arms outstretched and mouth open in a full-throated cry.

_Daddy!_ The exultant solidity of her as she'd slammed into him like a low-skimming meteor, and the faint scent of her detangling shampoo. _Daddy, daddy, daddy!_ Hiccups and tears and panting, gulping breaths as she clawed at the fabric of his shirt in her eagerness to reach him. The weight of her in his arms as he'd scooped her up, and the plosive heat of her breath in the crook of his neck as she'd burrowed into him.

Of Drushka, who inherited his reserve, normally so aloof yet clinging to him with panicky tightness, his head buried painfully in his floating rib like a homesteader's claim stake. _Dad!_ Thin and impossibly young, nine going on four. So small, and yet the unshakeable pillar holding him up as he'd stood on the small patch of grass between the cabin and the Alaskan wilderness and clutched his sniffling, snuffling little sister in his opposite arm.

Of Mike, so beautiful that he'd thought her a product of his fevered brain, weeping as she'd rushed to hold him, tears on her face and nose clogged with snot and an _I love you so much_ on her trembling, cracked lips. The smell of her, Dove body bar soured by grief and too many sleepless nights when she'd wondered just where the hell he'd been. Her touch, scrabbling and frantic in the too-small bed that was all the cabin could offer them, fingers raking hypersensitive flesh and teeth worrying his throat and his earlobe and the hard, heaving plane of his sternum.

_Please, baby, please. God, I've missed you._ Voice strangled with tears and ragged, shameful need and her quivering thighs clamped around his blindly-grinding hips.

"If you don't want to accept because you're not ready or he's not the one, fine. But if you turn him down because you're afraid of losing them someday, then you might as well have let them put you on a plane back to Russia because you're not living anyway." 

The tension doesn't break as he expects after the dispensation of such sage brotherly advice, but settles and deepens, stale and yellow, breath from a diseased, coffee-stained mouth.

"And then there is you," Kirill mumbles, and glowers into the dregs of his beer.

"What about me?" he asks, torn between worry for his disaster magnet of a sibling and creeping alarm.

It's Kirill's turn to shrug, a short, sharp jerk that reminds him of high-velocity projectile impact. Kirill's lower lip bulges as he scrapes his tongue over the backs of his teeth. One foot rocks from toe to heel and back again. "Our father would not approve."

It's such a non-sequitur that he can only stare at him in helpless befuddlement. "Okay, but who gives a shit? He's dead. _And I hope he's fucking burning in Hell for all the years he stole from us. If he hadn't been such a dickless bastard, I wouldn't've spent eighteen years wondering where you were and too damn many of those years thinking you were dead._

"You're not."

"And? What, you think I think like him?" he sputters, thunderstruck. "You think I give a single sloppy fuck what that moth-asshole thought about anything? The only thing I share with that prick is his DNA-" _And I wish I didn't share that much_ , he almost finishes, but such an admission would be tantamount to wishing there were no Kirill, no family life in Berlin, when he could still catch glimpses of what their mother must have seen in him in their father's face, and that's a cut whose depth might run without end, and so he lets it pass unspoken.

"He wasn't all bad," Kirill says. 

_The fuck he wasn't,_ he thinks savagely, but this too, dies on his tongue. Their father has a habit of souring everything he touches even from the grave, and he'll be damned if he'll let him ruin this, too. "That was a side I wasn't privy to," is all the diplomacy he can manage, however, and so he hurries on before that darkening expression on Kirill's face can harden into anger. "Why the hell do you think I would care if you married Siberius?"

The anger dissolves, supplanted by forlorn uncertainty. "It's one thing to have a little fun in the sheets, a little dirty in the dark. Then you could tell yourself I was just having a little fun, a little experimenting." Another shrug, this one one-shouldered and far more fluid. "But it's another to know your brother is in love with a man." He scuffs the toe of his sneaker across your hardwood and frowns at his empty beer bottle.

"You've got to be shitting me," he says flatly. "The only thing I don't want is to see you buffing my living room floor with your balls."

"We thought you would be gone longer," Kirill counters with a defensive jab of his fingers. "And I was on my hands and knees. It's not my fault my balls are so big."

"That's not the point," he snaps, exasperated, and how the fuck has he managed to get him sidetracked like this? "The last thing I needed to see was your lily-white ass being treated like a paddle ball."

"My ass is your ass," he points out with infuriating savoir faire, and William briefly wonders how mightily Mike would chew his ass if he just punched him in the ear.

"The point," he says loudly, dragging the conversation back to the land of sanity by a sheer effort of will, "is that it was wholly inappropriate."

Kirill only smirks.

"And my other point," he barrels on before Kirill can get in another smartass remark, "is that I couldn't give a damn if you want to suck tits or dick. Does loving Siberius make you happy?"

"Yes." Reflexive as the breath required to fashion the word, and devoid of all adolescent bravado. As concise and unflinching as the answers he'd given during his debriefing after his defection.

"Then for God's sake, let yourself be happy. Get married and ball-buff your own goddamn floor."

He might as well be talking to the concrete wall of a kill room for all the reaction he shows, but after a few torpid blinks and an absent scratch of his nose with his index finger, he gives a single nod and squares his shoulders, a good cadet snapping to attention. "Yes, he says, resolute. "I will accept." As though he were deciding on a sofa and not one of the most important decisions of his life. He sets his empty beer bottle on the low-slung coffee table between them--not on the coaster, he notes disapprovingly--and raises a haunch from the sofa cushion to pull his phone from his back pocket.

"What are you doing?" he demands suspiciously.

"Getting engaged?" Kirill answers slowly, as though he were a sad innocent.

"Not over the phone you're not." He makes a grab for the phone.

Kirill, damn him, is quicker, always has been, and he snatches it away with lazy ease.

"Kirill, I'm serious. Don't be a jackass. This is important."

Kirill holds the phone aloft. "What does it matter how I say yes as long as I say yes?" He looks at him, thumb hovering over the CALL button.

William suppresses a sigh, and it's a wonder the effort doesn't cause a hernia. "Because-look, was Siberius dressed like an asshole when he popped the question?" He gestures vaguely at Kirill's rumpled tunic shirt and grubby cargo pants.

"There's nothing wrong with these clothes," Kirill huffs. "They're comfortable." He eyes him from beneath his upraised phone, gelid and affronted, a cat whose tail has been trodden upon by an idiot foot. "But yes, he was dressed up." His thumb falls away from the screen.

William nods as though that were what he expected. "Of course he was. Because he's not a caveman, and he knows how important this is. And he wants you to feel special. Like you're worth the effort. Don't you think he deserves at least that much?"

"I'm not a caveman," Kirill mutters, but it's a half-hearted protest at best, and his phone drifts steadily lapward. William can see the gears turning in his head, doubtless cataloguing the myriad ways Siberius has spoiled him rotten--the homecooked meals every night that would be the envy of tsars and state dinners; the neat, safe, and elegant home designed with Kirill's hobbies and interests in mind, with its gun range and mancave that William can only envy and the rooms studded with cat trees and scratching posts and discreet, self-cleaning litter boxes; the garden he tends with such fastidious care, lush with roses and baby's breath and a haven for birds and butterflies; the constant, unobtrusive affection with which he lavishes him.

"What did you do when you asked Michelle?" Kirill asks, and William knows he's won. Now it's just a matter of letting Kirill determine the terms of his surrender.

"I dressed to the nines and took her to Marcel's and dropped a week's pay. Best money I ever spent." He does not add that he remembers nothing of the fancy cuisine or the ballyhooed wine. All he remembers of that night is his exquisite, dry-mouthed terror as he'd driven to the restaurant, his hands clamped so tightly around the wheel that they ached for days afterward. The headiness of Michelle's perfume as he pulled out her chair. The startling whiteness of the table linens. The radiance of her beauty, so complete that it had frozen his tongue inside a mouth gone wooden and clumsy with the certainty that this was a fool's errand, that she would say no and laugh in his face.

And her yes, of course, always her yes, the benediction that had returned the light and sound to his world and the air to his lungs.

"A reservation at a place like that would take days, maybe weeks, and I don't think I should wait that long to give him an answer."

_Because if he made you wait that long, you know what the answer would be, and even if you accepted, you would always wonder why it took so long, wonder if he had to talk himself into you instead of seeing it as a dream come true._ "You could at least say yes in a suit."

"I don't have a suit." A damp cockatoo now, dispirited and truculent.

"I have a few. You can borrow one, but I swear to God, _bratishka,_ it better not come back with any suspicious stains." An image arises in his mind of Siberius and Kirill having a celebratory fuck in the backseat of their SUV, his Tom Ford suit caught in the punishing crossfire of snapping hips, victim to sweat and heat and a mistimed spurt of jizz.

"I don't know what you think we're going to be doing in it," Kirill sniffs loftily. Then, drily, "Siberius is very tidy."

_Not during sex, he's not,_ William thinks wryly, and sees them going for broke on his living room floor, the hardwood subjected to the exuberant thump of his brother's balls and the demure squeak of Siberius' knees.

"Hey, uh uh," William says when Kirill makes to head into his bedroom and the untold sartorial wonders of his unguarded closet, so foolishly offered. "You're not touching a damn thing in my closet until you shower. Were you that scuzzy when he popped the question?"

Kirill scowls at him, looking like nothing so much as a disgruntled barn owl. "What the fuck are you talking about?" he demands. "This is how I always look." He raises his arm and takes an investigatory sniff.

"That's my point. Shower. Now." He jabs a finger in the direction of the hallway and its cornucopia of cleaning options.

"Prick," Kirill snorts as he goes, but he does go, muttering under his breath all the while.

"Remind me not to have you write my eulogy," William calls cheerily at Kirill's back as it recedes into the mid-afternoon murk of the hallway.

_Keep jerking his chain, and he's liable to wipe his ass on your suits just for spite,_ Cynthia says, her lipstick as red as the blood that had pooled on the frozen concrete of that warehouse where he'd made his choice and chosen the road less taken.

The vision of Kirill grinning as he uses one of his best suit coats as ass floss is so vivid that he's tempted to follow him down the hall and do a spot check of his bedroom, but he refuses to give him the satisfaction of knowing he's gotten under his skin, and so he ignores the impulse and counts to one hundred, and when he hits forty-five, he's relieved to hear the churlish gurgle of water in the pipes.

Kirill takes his sweet-ass time, trying, no doubt, to put the lie to the tankless water heater and its never-ending supply of deliciously hot water, but he eventually reappears, thoroughly-scrubbed and dried so vigorously that he retains a pink glow as he presents himself for inspection. He has also, William notes with absolutely no surprise, managed to help himself to his best suit. 

Paired with his sneakers.

"Hey, no. You're not wearing those shoes with that suit."

Kirill looks down at his sneakered feet, then back up at him. "Why not? They're perfectly good shoes."

"For a grocery store run in a town where no one knows you, maybe. Get your ass back in there and change. I think I've got some Bruno Malis still in the box in the back of the closet."

"Since when are you such a model?"

"Since Mike made me buy them for holidays with the in-laws."

"Of course she did. Wouldn't want you looking scruffy in front of Mr. Moneybags."

"Just get your ass in there and change your shoes. And slap on some cologne or aftershave."

"I just washed the stink off, and now you want me to smell like incontinent skunk," he mutters, ever the font of grace and charm.

William rolls his eyes. "Just do it. You'll thank me later."

Kirill blows a raspberry at that pronouncement, but he performs an about face that would make a drill instructor proud and returns to William's despoiled closet, and William hears him rummaging through the assorted boxes that line the upper shelf. "Spend so much money on fucking shoes," he hears him mutter, followed by the irascible rustle of tissue paper.

"Maybe you'd've fucked a better class of stripper if you'd've worn a pair of Malis," William calls.

The airy _thunk_ of an empty shoebox hitting the floor. "What makes you think I haven't?" he replies with oily confidence. "Charm and money will get you any woman."

"When did you ever have charm?"

"Shut up." The _clop_ of patent leather dress shoes on hardwood, and William cringes.

Kirill emerges soon after, arms spread like a preening Mafia don. "Do I meet your approval now?" he needles.

"Maybe now Siberius won't remember his engagement with embarrassment." William retorts. "Bit thin in the ass, though," he muses as Kirill slides past him and makes a beeline for the living room.

"Siberius thinks my ass is perfect," Kirill informs.

William pulls a face that Kirill doesn't see. "Well, they say love makes you blind."

"That explains you and Michelle," Kirill fires back. Then, "These shoe hurt." He minces into the living room and picks up his phone.

"We have the same feet."

"Maybe mine is bigger," Kirill says placidly, and William doubts he's referring to his feet.

William can think of no reply, and so he changes the subject with the practiced deftness for which the Orlov men are so roundly renowned. "What the fuck are you doing with that? I thought we agreed you weren't going to be an asshole." He jerks his chin at the phone in his hand. 

"We did," Kirill agrees without looking at him, and his fingers fly over the screen.

"Then what the hell are you doing?"

"Relax before you give yourself a hemorrhoid. I don't want to have to buy you one of those little pillows."

The best William can muster in retaliation is a mulish set of the jaw, and he consoles himself with the thought that it's only because Kirill's about to secure his future happiness that he doesn't just kick him in the balls and leave him to wheeze and splutter on the floor.

_That and I don't want him to piss in my suit,_ he tells himself, and his smarting ego heartily concurs. 

He's still indulging in his petty fantasy of fraternal vengeance when he hears the rear gate open, followed by the muted tramp of multiple feet. For one crazed moment, he's sure that his esteemed colleagues at the company have chosen now of all times to decide that Siberius and Nera's extraterrestrial status is a problem. Kirill's head snaps up at the sound of the approach, a deer scenting the wind, and he rubs the ball of his thumb over his phone screen.

_We're on the same doomsday wavelength,_ William thinks as Boomer, roused from his torpor on the loveseat Mike has forbidden him, streaks past on his way to investigate this strange noises. He noses the blinds aside and utters a soft _boof_ , and his tail begins to swing in a slow, pendulous arc.

_Not strangers, then._ He reaches the door just as there comes a soft, tentative knock.

"Who's there, Boom, huh?" he asks, and skims his fingers over golden ruff.

"Boof," is Boomer's effusive reply, and his dog tag jingles as he dances from paw to paw in giddy excitement.

"With the way your whole ass is wagging, it can only be one person," he says, amused, and sure enough, when he peers through the slats in the blinds, he sees the lush, Victorian crimson of Nera's dress as she stands beside her brother.

"Wow, they did get fancy for you," he says as he disengages the chain and deadbolt on the back door and pulls it open.

Siberius offers him a wan smile and presses a fist to his chest. "Hello, William," he says in his deep, rumbling baritone, and William can't suppress a twinge of worry as he looks into eyes that are dull and tired despite the bewildering flares of fuschia eyeshadow with which he has painted them.

_That's new. He looks like Grace Jones on her way to Studio 54._ "Hey, Siberius, good to see you. Come on in." He steps back to let them enter, but the space is immediately taken up by Boomer, who yips happily and sniffs at Nera, entranced by the colorful array of ribbons threaded into her long, dark curls.

Nera giggles and gives him a merry hoot and a pat. _Hello, Boomer._

"Forgive me, I do not mean to intrude, but Kirill asked me to come over," Siberius says as he picks his way around an ecstatic golden retriever, the fabric of what William can only guess is a robe bunched in one hand in an effort to save it from the lash of Boomer's tail.

_Is this what Kirill meant by dressed up?_ he wonders. _Or is this the Tumerian equivalent of the floral-print mumu and curlers?_ "No problem. How many times do I have to tell you, you guys aren't am imposition? You're welcome anytime."

"You did kick us out," Kirill needles, but there's no venom in it. It's absent, almost dazed, and his gaze is fixed on Siberius. And his hands, steady as stone as they measured the final, ticking seconds of a stranger's life, are trembling.

_Gonna go with not a mumu._

Siberius turns his attention to Kirill, and his lips part in surprise. _Ma atet nin._ You look glorious." He closes the two steps between them and reaches for his hands.

"You don't have to look so surprised," Kirill grouses, but he takes Siberius' hands in his own, and his chest swells ass he gathers his courage. "I wanted to look good for you before I answered you," he says, as though it had been his decision to don an expensive suit and uncomfortable shoes for the occasion.

William, rather gallantly, he thinks, does not roll his eyes.

Siberius straightens, eyes suddenly bright with anxious hope. "You have considered, then?"

Kirill shrugs. "There wasn't much to consider," he answers nonchalantly, but his hands tighten around Siberius'.

"And?" Brittle, a hushed rasp.

A soft huff. "My love, do you really have to ask? Yes. Yes, I will have you."

"Yes?" Siberius repeats, awestruck. "Did you say yes?"

Kirill chuckles, low and easy, and in it, William catches a glimpse of his brother as he must look to all the women who have spent a night in his bed, seductive and dangerous, the thrum of a tiger's throaty purr beneath your caressing hand. "Yes," Kirill rumbles. "Yes." He lets go of Siberius' hands and cradles his face in his palms. "Did you truly think the answer would be anything else?"

Siberius says nothing, but presses his forehead to Kirill's and closes his eyes. He sags as the tension leaves his body, and Kirill croons softly and slips his arms around him.

"How ridiculous you are," he croons fondly as Siberius clings to him, and the kiss he places on his lips is so chaste and tender that William turns his head to give them privacy and swallows around a lump in his throat.

Nera, ever the spirit of balls-out and devil-may-care, throws up her arms, tosses back her head, and unleashes a ululating hoot. She launches into an ungainly caper, a capuchin trying to detach a colony of fire ants from her ass, and the ribbons in her hair rustle and flutter gaily in the manufactured breeze.

"I take it this is a good thing?" William grins as Boomer joins the one-girl party and stands up on his hind legs to perform a short hop.

Kirill raises his head. "I would say Nera approves, yes," he offers drily, and Siberius turns his head to survey the merry mayhem.

"She's trying to do our traditional dance of thanksgiving," he explains after watching the exuberant flail and whirl of her arms and legs. "She was still in diapers the last time our clan did this variant, but I guess she remembers enough to know she's supposed to do it even if she doesn't quite remember what it is. And it's probably easier when you have other people to mimic in place of following the beat."

"Why don't we have our own celebration? I'll be damned if I'll dance, but how bout a drink to toast new beginnings?" 

Siberius demurs with a shake of his head. "Gratitude, but I'm afraid that alcohol would not be wise with my fast."

"Fast?" Kirill echoes, and frowns.

Siberius nods. "A purification ritual every Tumerian who asks for another's heart must undertake. No food after sunset, and we may take only rice with a little salt, water, milk, and peeled apples or pears."

"For how long?" Kirill, waspish with alarm, and William can see his gears turning as he catalogues every meal of the past few days.

"Seven days."

_Christ, no wonder you look like shit. Nothing but rice and fruit for a week, and I bet your nerves burned through those like a trust-fund kid through Daddy's money._ "When can you break the fast?"

"Now that Kirill has accepted, I may eat as I wish. In fact, it is customary to have a large feast with friends and family once a couple decides to join."

"That's exactly what we're going to have. How about Nera and I make a grocery run to pick up the stuff for surf and turf, steak and shrimp, maybe, with a few sides, lobster mac for the kids?"

Siberius nods. "That would be splendid," he says, and droops against Kirill, the adrenaline that has propelled him to this moment finally spent.

"Seven days," Kirill mutters furiously, his face blanched with guilt. He strokes the smooth, milky skin just below Siberius' Bauhaus mullet. "You would be a shitty husband dead," he seethes. "Idiot." Kirill for _I love you. Please don't leave._

"There's some leftover rotisserie chicken and potato salad from last night in the fridge to tide you over. Why don't you stay here and whisper sweet nothings until I get back? Kirill's already gotten such a head start."

Kirill scowls at him over Siberius' shoulder, but Siberius utters an exhausted chuckle. "All gratitude. Would you be so kind as to pick up a bottle of red wine? The promised couple is supposed to share a drink before bed on the choosing night. Nothing fancy, just not cooking wine."

"No problem." He turns to Nera, who has long since given up her dance in favor of hugging Boomer, who is only too happy accept her adoration. _Good Boomer,_ she says, _Good Boomer._ She reinforces this pronouncement with a thorough rub from head to withers.

He dredges his memory for his pathetic reserve of sign. He should know more, he know, should be more fluent, but he's been busy, or so he's told himself on the increasing number of occasions when his conscience has prodded him on the subject. It's just been easier to rely on Siberius and Kirill and the kids, who have soaked it up like sponges and gleefully passed it on to their friends as a secret code for their playground adventures.

_Need to really get off my ass on this,_ he chastises himself as Nera senses his scrutiny and gazes at him with a tentative, hopeful smile. _She's a sweet kid who loves the whole damn world, and she deserves to have a family that cares enough to talk to her._

_Go store?_ he manages feebly, and God, she must think him a knuckle-dragging idiot.

"You're an idiot," Kirill supplies helpfully on his way to the refrigerator for the chicken and potato salad that will stave off Siberius' imminent collapse.

"You could help me out."

"You could have learned," comes his reply from the depths of the refrigerator.

_Boomer come?_ Nera asks.

_I think Boomer better stay here, sweetheart. He gets lonely in the car by himself, and besides, I'm going to need your help picking out the food for our special dinner,_ is what he wants to say, but what she gets is, _No Boomer. You me go store food,_ and yep, he's a fucking caveman if her pained and pitying expression is anything to go by.

But she is an unfailingly polite child and does not mention his gross ineptitude. She merely turns to Boomer and signs, _Sorry, Boomer. Love you._ Then she heaves the long-suffering, bone-deep sigh of a woman long accustomed to sorting out someone else's bullshit, smooths her dress with persnickety delicacy, and brushes errant ribbons over her shoulder.

_Nera go,_ she says solemnly, and offers him her hand with the aloof dignity of a queen.

_Thank you,_ he says, and his heart clenches inside his chest. She's too small and too young and too vulnerable in such a loud, savage, careless world, and by rights, she should be a creature of howling rage and bared fangs and an insatiable thirst for vengeance after all that she has endured and been denied, but instead, she is a lady, poised and patient and steady in a world she doesn't fully understand.

Her hand is small and cool when he takes it and thereby silences her until they get to the car, and she burrs companionably low in her throat.

"I'm off. My suit better still be in reputable shape when I get back," he warns as he heads for the front door.

"They'll be talking about the stains for years," Kirill promises gaily from the kitchen amid the clatter and thump of cutlery and plates, and William bites back a whimper at the thought of the dry-cleaning bill.

But the suit is much as he left it when he eases through the front door an hour-and-a-half later with a bag full of strip steaks and porterhouses in the crook of his arm and Nera bringing up the rear with three more bags hanging from one small arm and a rolling cooler trailing her like a faithful hound. Oh, the jacket has come off and is draped over the back of the couch, and the sleeves of his linen dress shirt are rolled to the elbow on Kirill's arms as he sits on the couch with Siberius lying across his laps, but his floor remains unpolished, and there are no balls on view. There is just rumpled dress slacks and too-tight Bruno Mali shoes and the stripped carcass of a rotisserie chicken on two plates on the coffee table.

And his brother, gazing down at a sleeping, boneless Siberius not with leering desire or cocksure, smirking bravado, but with naked tenderness and a tremulous devotion that borders on the holy. 

_I need a picture,_ he thinks, dry-mouthed with urgency. _I need a picture before it's too late, before Nera scuffs the cooler over the front step or Boomer decides now is a great time to lick his empty ballsack and the spell is broken. If he knows I'm here, knows we see, he'll retreat behind his facade of bullshit artist and professional asshole._

He eases his hand into the front pocket of his khakis and swaps his keys for his phone. _Please, please, please,_ he breathes as he thumbs past his lockscreen and brings up his camera app. _Please, Nera, be quiet as a little mouse for just a few more seconds._ He centers the shot and takes three in rapid succession. 

It's lost much of its magic on his screen, hampered as it is by the limits of technology, but he knows he won't delete it. It's still a piece of his brother, a glimpse of him as he could be and always should have been. Sometime tonight, he'll upload it to his laptop and print out a copy, and when he's sure Mike's busy with the kids or taking some me-time in the hot steam of their shower, he'll put it in his box, bury this treasure where the world will never find it, never sully it with its corrupted, grasping fingers.

Nera, tired of waiting for the inexplicable logjam to clear, shoulders her way between him and the doorjamb. She utters an inquisitive chirp and cranes to peer at his screen, and her expression shifts from irritation to fondness. She releases the handle of the cooler, which nudges his ass with an impudent slap, and raises her hands, and this sign he understands.

"Yes, it is good," he agrees. "Very good." He looks at the picture one more time, and then he grins and plunges headlong into the magic.


End file.
